What do you mean by "integrates it into their search results"?
Hipmunk's killer feature is the ability to easily visualize the flight in terms of the time you leave, the time you arrive and the time spent at various intermediate locations. It becomes more useful when there are no nonstop flights. Google is taking a different approach with their UI, which is fine.
In terms of whether I'd use google or hipmunk to search for flights in the future, I'd say that it depends on what my priorities are for that particular flight.
by "integrate into their search results" i mean.. if you search google for "sfo lax" and it brins up this new Google Flight page with their organic results.
Well, Adam has said in the past that only a small amount of Hipmunk's traffic comes from Google search results, so they don't really have that far to fall there.
On the other hand, users are fickle and traffic can be a bit butterfly-effecty, so it's hard to predict the impact of something like this. That said, I don't expect Hipmunk to panic or take this lying down.
So who are you rooting for? In the hypothetical world where there is a winner and a loser (which travel search pretty much is, given its maturity), are you rooting for the home team or for the guys you worked with for so long?
The bad news for hipmunk is it wasn't that much of an improvement over actual travel sites. I never had that much trouble using Expedia and I already know how to purchase my ticket right on the site. So there wasn't much reason to use Hipmunk in the first place.
This Google search interface is pretty nice, and makes a lot more sense than Hipmunk did.
Really? Google gives you a sort-able grid which doesn't seem that helpful to me.
Hipmunk gives me a "heat map" style presentation which I can understand multiple factors at once without scanning text:
Color = carrier / layovers
Line length = total travel duration
Timeline position = flight start/end time
Ordered by Agony (or whatever)
I can take one quick look and grasp all the flights without a second thought. In my opinion, Hipmunk's UI is genius where Google's looks like a school project.
Interesting, I like the simple layout, but it would be nice to have a price comparison of a few days in each direction like some sites have (I'm thinking Virgin Atlantic) so you can save some money by leaving a day early or a day late. Overall though bravo.
Yeah, I find that invaluable. My common case is that I am travelling one or two full weeks, but am flexible about whether I leave/return on Sat/Sun. Often staying one additional day is $200 more per person, above the price I value a day of vacation at.
Well, it was a matter of time, wasn't it? For now it's a bit too fiddly when compared to the likes of Hipmunk, save for the booking process which is quite streamlined. And the search itself, which is blazing fast. On second thought, this is really not a bad effort. I can see it gaining huge traction in no time.
That really is good. Hipmunk is still better if you know what days you want to fly, but this is great if you haven't yet decided precisely when, or precisely where, you want to go.
A pity it only works within the US so far, but I'm sure they'll add international destinations eventually.
Also a shame that Southwest still won't cooperate with any of these guys. I guess it's a rational decision on their part: be cheapest most of the time and hope that people won't bother to compare your fares to others.
Yes, the first site that has JetBlue and SouthWest comparisons with the major airlines will have my traffic. I usually prefer to travel on price when it's not business so I love how Google has made this clear - that's my core problem with Hipmunk and I'm not sure why they don't just tell you the cheapest days to fly, like Kayak at least tries to. I also like how http://skyscanner.com does it.
I love your site. It easily has the best UI. I knew in the back of my mind that you have the "flexible" feature, as I've seen it before, but never thought about or even bothered to use it, because it just isn't visible enough. It may help to make it a link on the results page, and perhaps mention it on the loading screen as well.
Google Flights only supports the US at the moment. I see this as a good thing for Skyscanner which covers Europe well, they can adopt and implement new ideas from Google Flight search before Google gets around to other countries.
except that Hipmunk's interface is a clean clone of ITA's matrix search's gantt view (http://matrix.itasoftware.com/) - I'm sure it'll be a matter of time before that makes it into google's interface.
> except that Hipmunk's interface is a clean clone of ITA's matrix search's gantt view
Why clean clone? Gantt charts are (technically) 115 years old, and it's not like there are 5 billion ways to display a gantt chart, especially one with no paths. Other flight search startup have independently stumbled upon the idea of gantt charts for flight, why could that not be yet another independent reinvention?
> I'm sure it'll be a matter of time before that makes it into google's interface.
Or not, ITA does not seem to have met much success with their matrix so far.
They are the same as in yes, it's the same idea - a gantt chart but Hipmunk's way better looking and more interactive.
When I say clone, I don't mean to imply they simply copied it with no originality - I'm just pointing out this fact to all the people who claim Hipmunk's advantage is their gantt view..which ITA already has a versin of and can be improved to match or be better than Hipmunk's.
> When I say clone, I don't mean to imply they simply copied it with no originality
That's what "cloning" implies though: making the exact same thing.
> I'm just pointing out this fact to all the people who claim Hipmunk's advantage is their gantt view..which ITA already has a versin of and can be improved to match or be better than Hipmunk's.
But have not so far, so Hipmunk's remains an advantage. You "could always" copy to match, in theory. Does not mean it's technically feasible, let alone easy. Or that you think it's a good idea.
Let's be honest. Google wants us to use their services because the better they understand us, the better they can advertise to us. That's the profit model at Google. I don't begrudge them for it either. You've got to turn a profit if you want to keep the lights on.
I don't mean any offense, but the "Don't be evil" mantra is growing a bit tired. Evil is a strong word, and "not being evil" is a pretty low bar, IMO.
Would your complaint sound strange if it was worded, "Are you aware that several Googlers resigned after a petition ignored by 90% of the workforce was ignored by management?"
Ultimately, some policy on some random social networking site nobody uses is not much of a big deal. If you don't like the policy, don't use Google+. Easy.
"It seems that the G+ team is currently overwhelmed with technical issues of the current system -- that, combined with Vic's attitude, means that nymwars is not going to be addressed anytime soon. If engineers can scrape together 20% time to implement possible solutions and manage to convince decision-makers to let them roll out changes, we might see something."
It sounds less like it was ignored and more like it isn't a priority for a resource stretched team.
People still believe in a benevolent google after the App Engine scandal? Let me ask you something; what would Google have to do before you finally believe they're just a publicly traded company?
Really? Getting a bunch of developers locked into a platform and then raising prices sometimes 100 times more than it was? What would they have to do for it to be a scandal for you?
If Apple suddenly came out and said "right, from today on we want 75% of your sales instead of 30%" would you have the same reaction?
the first motivation of any for profit corporation, especially one as large and successful as Google, is profit. That is their entire reason for existence, don't fool yourself into believing otherwise.
There is a lot of truth in this, but what impresses me most about Google is the way they have aligned their business model with their users interests and how that has enabled them to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term profits... it's a very Buffett-esque strategy that is difficult to pull-off.
Many people try to earn profit, but the best way to earn profit is to seek to serve. Profit is a result, not a goal. Service is a goal, the result of which is profit. Get your motivation right and the methods will follow.
People like to say this, maybe believing it fulfills some deep-seated need for cynicism, or makes the speaker feel wise and worldly. But what is your actual argument in support of this? Just saying it does not make it true.
If profit is the only motivation for decisions at Google, why did it pull out of China? I'm sure you're cynical and wise about that too, but here's what I can tell you. I saw Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/interview-sergey-br...) and he got fiery and emotional about it. This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
I never said profit was their only motivation, but it is the reason they are a corporation, and not a charity.
Not necessarily. To parrot one of the other posters here: saying it doesn't make it true.
You could also argue that being a charity would be a very slow and inefficient means to achieving many of the things Google has set out to do. Being a for-profit corp gets them there faster and with fewer distractions not core to their purpose. I'd even venture to guess that it wouldn't be possible for Google to do what it does as a non-profit.
Sure, profit is a motivation, but it's certainly not the only (or even necessarily primary) motivation.
"That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work."
You said profit was the "first" motivation. You haven't even justified that. Saying that a corporation has to at least break even to avoid being a charity is a far cry from your previous grandstanding. Just because a corporation has to make money doesn't mean that money is the "first" motivation for every decision. It doesn't explain why Google (not Sergey, Google) pulled out of China.
Um...they chose to go into China in the first place, and they didn't do it for charity work. A lot of people thought that was pretty evil.
In any case, the parent doesn't have to justify anything, because he's stating a relatively well-known argument: in the US, there's an obligation for corporate executives to maximize shareholder value. This point is debated (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/corp...), but not to the extent that you're claiming.
Do you mean "why did they make a big rant about pulling out of China and then not actually do it until they were literally cyber-attacked by the government"? Google was never all that big in China anyway. I'm sure their whole strategy around this was to get gullible people to buy into the "Don't do evil" nonsense.
>Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview and he got fiery and emotional about it.
Yea? So do politicians. Very passionate about what they're talking about until it comes time to vote. Then they follow their wallets.
>This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
I know plenty of people who grew up in the Soviet Union. What exactly do you think goes on there that makes the "lucky few" who escape want to change the world? Maybe it did have some profound effect on him but it sounds more likely to be simple positioning. Getting people to think he really cares will cause them to defend him every time his company betrays that trust.
>This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
It may well be old and tired but it's how the world works. The only thing a CEO can get in trouble for not doing is increasing share holder value.
Profit is a large motivation, for sure. There are some folks at Google (I'm guessing particularly on the business side), who probably have that as their primary motivation.
I think the core of Google is Larry, Sergey, Urs, Craig, and the other dozens of engineers I've read about (never met), and from their actions and words over a course of a decade, I think they've proved that a huge motivator for them all is to simple make the world better.
They've all got lots of money. I think the long term evidence shows that they care about doing good. I think their motivation for earning money is to expand their own ability to do good.
If someone disagrees, instead of responding with more argument I'd ask you to make a table and list everything Google done has done in one column and whether or not it seems "good" or "evil" in another. Then we could debate further.
Haha, if you want to disagree with my rose-colored review of why Google are so benevolent then please do a bunch of work so I can just sit here nitpick with nearly no effort on my part.
Google has a dual-class stock structure which gives class B holders (Schmidt, Page, Brin) 10 votes per share v.s. 1 vote per share for the rest.
This is relevant to your statement, because while it's pretty much a requirement for a publicly held company to pursue profit at any cost, it's not necessarily the case for a company run by the people that have a disproportionately large number of votes on major issues.
I'm pretty sure they still have over 50% of the votes, so together they can decide how Google will handle tough moral issues without any support from other shareholders.
I would argue that it's entirely plausible that a couple altruistic billionaires will sacrifice a few dollars in pursuit of non-evil (their opinion of non-evil mind you).
I saw a documentary about advertising agencies. They interviewed someone working at the marketing division of nike. She said her job was to get people to play sports. That of course is not true. Her job is to get people to buy shoes. I think your comment is misguided as well. Google really just wants people to click on ads.
Yes, Google wants to make more money. No question about it. But why are you so eager to reject any other possible motivation just because profit-making is involved? There is satisfaction in making the world a better place; why wouldn't Sergey & Larry want to get that satisfaction?
Exactly! I can't agree more on that. I can get a job which will give me trise as much as I make now with my startup+freelance jobs. But that wouldnt give me satisfaction. I suppose even seeing how people react on what you're up to on scale that Google operates has to be cool.
"I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better."
I don't doubt that the people working at google want to make the world better and work on cool software. I don't think that is the primary motivation of google as a company.
Wow, wtff? I don't understand how people can get so up in arms about Apple fanboys so long as google has fanboys like this.
Are you serious or trolling? I would expect if someone had such an ignorant/naive opinion they would at least be smart enough to not let other people know.
Here's what I see from google:
Search - a product that helps them sell ads
Gmail - a product that helps them sell ads
Google App engine - A platform where they used the hype of MapReduce et al to get people to join and then ramped up pricing drastically after a lot of people had been on the service (a service for which switching away almost certainly means a big rewrite) for years
Android - phone OS to help them sell ads.
I'm not seeing a lot of "make the world better" in there. Unless you mean "for Google executives".
Or, you know, they could just be taking a cut for connecting users with flights better and faster than their competitors. But please, keep thinking that google is hoping to populate some evil database with precious, precious data to make their advertising 0.000001% better. There's no way they are considering the obvious and profitable notion of getting serious about travel search.
No probably not 0.000001% better, but if they make it 0.1% better that's $28 million per year. That 0.1% is probably doable optimizing ad placements after long haul flights.
the naievety is amusing. what site isn't using some sort of tracker to better serve you ads or market to you better using your information to sell you something.
If you drove past a restaurant that had a big sign outside that said "no cockroaches here", what would you associate with it?
I have always been amazed that some people would consider "don't be evil" to be a motto with any power to motivate or lead people, since it ventures no strong opinion, and points in no clear direction.
"Do good" is far more costly, less likely to be politically correct, and more likely to invite ridicule. At the same time, this kind of heart-on-sleeve sincerity has more power to inspire. Sincerity, humility, innocence tend to achieve more than cynicism and jaded worldly wisdom.
I think Don't be Evil is just easier, since you could make the argument that you could theoretically actually enumerate a list of things that most people would consider truly "evil". Do Good... well, good luck making that list.
So, uh... in hindsight I guess I'm just agreeing with you :-P
What I really meant is it's just easier to not do evil. You can look at something and say "that's evil, so I won't do it". Sure, sometimes that can cause you hardship, but you deal with it. Maybe evil is an uncountable, but you don't need to count it. You just passively avoid options that are evil.
Doing good is harder. You have to actively seek out and choose good things to do from a huge set. That means attempting to enumerate at least part of that set. You have to figure out how to actually do those things. As a public corporation, you have to figure out how to do things and spin it as being in the company's best interests.
Yes, it's also harder because it requires leaders with strength of character, willing to be misunderstood, willing to go against the grain, willing to stand alone at times, even in the face of opposition.
Weak leaders who don't do evil, but who also fail to do good, or fail to actively advocate and define doing good, are as much part of the problem because they fail in their responsibility of teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in matters of service.
You would only need to "spin it as being in the company's best interests" if the employer truly believes that business on any basis other than service is the most profitable.
> If you drove past a restaurant that had a big sign outside that said "no cockroaches here", what would you associate with it?
In a town in which I expected from experience to encounter a few cockroaches during any visit to any restaurant, I would find that a reasonable, positive, encouraging message to advertise with.
Nope, I don't think this one is about advertising. My guess is they want to move into the hotel referral sales game (it's not secret they've been trying to move into this space for a while). Before you can move into hotels though, you have to have a good flight search engine.
I am reminded time and time again how much "Don't be evil" mantra still holds for Google whenever other evil corporations do things like suing companies for looks of a product, primarily to hamper competition, and when they take cut out of sale made on their platform without adding any value whatsoever to the payment platform.
When was the last time Google abused its set of patents to screw competition? There are so many ways in which Google can be evil, but it consciously chooses not to be.
Patents are just one way to be evil. Another way to be evil might be to let Canadian companies advertise illegally to sell prescription drugs in the US.
"Investigators snared Google's ad system by creating seven undercover websites offering prescription drugs to be sold without a prescription or the completion of an online medical questionnaire, Martin-Weis said. An undercover investigator informed Google employees creating the advertising for the products that they were manufactured overseas and did not require customers to have a valid prescription, she said.
"In each instance, despite this knowledge, Google employees created a full advertising campaign for each of the undercover websites," Martin-Weis said."
Google is not law enforcement and thank god for that. Unlike apple which strives to be the moral leader of the world that nobody needs.
What google did here was illegal and it paid the price for it, but I don't see anybody getting directly harmed by google's decision, it was not google selling the drugs themselves or that the drugs were not upto the standards.
Besides by the same reasoning google should block all the illegal torrent sites, or wikileaks for that matter. Always remember your truth is not everybody else's truth, and it is better that the world's leading search engine does not take sides for you.
So let me get this straight. Protecting your IP with legal patents is evil. Willfully and knowingly getting paid to advertise illegally distributed prescription drugs is fine and dandy.
Clearly Google can do no evil, because everything they do is good in your eyes. Next thing you'll tell me that collecting advertising for child porn, hitmen, or crack is fine too. They don't make moral judgments. Except in China when they're having problems -- then they're suddenly all about morality.
I love all the jerk-wad Google apologists downvoting this. Few companies I can stand less than this self-righteous company and its blind followers.
What you might be seeing is the response of intelligent people who make up their own minds, and who consider Google overall to be much less evil than, oh, I dunno, MicrosoftOracleAppleFacebooketc? At least they have a bold statement that people like us, the media and their own employees will measure them up against, every hour of every day. Whether they always unfailingly measure up to it isn't as important as having it there. Especially for a profit-driven company that has unending opportunities to get just a bit more evil.
Even worse is the Orwellian Google love that's shitting all over this thread. Bill Gates started a charity because charities suck so bad and he wanted his billions to accomplish something. Steve Jobs doesn't even take money for his work (he gets stock options that he often doesn't even bother to extercise), hell, even Larry Ellison signed a thing to donate most of his fortune to charity when he dies.
But, no, it's Google who are the benevolent ones! Why? Well because their motto says so, duh?
Then maybe Steve Jobs should use his salary to make his products affordable to third world countries to do some real good than serving the riches of the world, and maybe Larry Ellison should have honored Sun Microsystem's policies of not suing anybody who uses Java APIs.
The point wasn't that Jobs/Ellison/Gates are great role models. I was showing that everyone that many would consider evil has also shown benevolence. There is nothing that makes the google founders stand out. In fact, I can't really think of anything they've done to make the world a better place besides say they want to. At least these other guys have done something.
Laws, being constructed by humans are not infalliable, or otherwise new laws won't replace existing ones. I don't know how willing the google's decision to permit advertising of prescription drugs was, but I am assuming they went with it because there was no precedent for such a thing in the past (the article mentions this as this is the first time a search engine being held responsible). But I hope and am almost certain that google won't do such a thing again. We will see.
Your example of child porn and crack is taking it too far and I am sure no such thing will happen. But if you want google to be enforcing all the laws for you, then maybe it should also detect your location and disallow all merchants catering to gay marriages in the search results, in states where it is prohibited.
Also I don't agree with your generalist approach to corporations that they are all equally evil. I for one would prefer a corporation which makes a bold statement about its policies being non evil and one which is ready to be called upon when it goes astray its path, than one which makes no such claims. To me this is not self righteousness but self discipline.
Stupid lawsuits about product looks are almost irrelevant to the society and individual.
A centralized database of individual's profiles is a much more dangerous tool. Google's efforts to destroy the idea of online privacy are much more dangerous to society.
I think, google is the one protecting the idea of online privacy by not having stupid restrictions on exporting your own social data and by allowing the users to decide what gets shared with whom (circles).
And stupid lawsuits are not irrelevant to the society, they hamper competition which in turn hampers technological progress. If you think Samsung Galaxy Tab and Ipad look similar, just look again at their screens side by side the difference between PLS and IPS is day and night, it is unfortunate that the court does not deem that as differentiating enough.
I think you're taking the "evil" part a little to seriously. Is Microsoft really "evil" by pressuring you into a tie-in to their products? They're not killing anybody. They're not defrauding anybody. They're creating an annoyance for their customers. That's a far cry from evil, but in half-serious Internet jargon it's "evil".
Whaaaat? Don't you know thew world is a better place if Google gets that $30 per credit card instead of organic search? Or now travel money, G offers, local etc.
Why is there a giant search bar at the top of the screen? I came here to look for flights, not to search the web.
Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen? I already know where I want to go. I don't need to look at a map to decide which destination I want. This part seems like more of a tech demo than anything.
The whole UI looks like it was designed by an engineer. For example when I want to book the flight, I get a tiny left/right arrow box-thing to increase the passenger count. Very poor choice of UI.
It's a cool in a geeky sense that destinations drop off the map when I click back and forth. How does this solve my problem as a customer though? I know I need to get from A to B. How does the map help me choose which flight from which carrier on what day?
True. The UI however is something else. Really gets out of the way and gives you what you are looking for. Feels effortless to use compared to the usual suspects in this domain, IMHO.
There's a giant search bar because it's part of Google Search. Like Images, Shopping or any of the other verticals. It's likely under testing, but I would wager at some point soon it will show up automatically in the sidebar as an option when searching for flight related topics.
> Why is there a giant search bar at the top of the screen?
This will be (if it isn't already) integrated with their search product. In other words, it'll be a part of search. You'll search for "flight from ny to sf" and that's what you'll see. Perfectly natural for them to have a consistent UI in their search product.
> Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen?
It's interactive. Try pulling the marker from one location to another. Very cool. I can also see the exact route that the flight will take. More intuitive.
I may have a general area of where I want to end up, but this lets you choose exactly where through a visual map. Again, very cool.
> Try pulling the marker from one location to another.
For me it just drags the map (Chrome 13.0.782.220 / OS X).
> I may have a general area of where I want to end up, but this lets you choose exactly where through a visual map. Again, very cool.
...is a map really helpful for this? How often do you want to go somewhere but not know the name? I'd rather they take all of that map space and use it for something else. I wouldn't mind something that says "hey, you could save $x on this flight if you went to $nearby_airport instead of the one you're on."
I doubt there will be. Flight data is typically well protected by the industry. The only reason Google has access is they acquired ITA who is the main data warehouse.
Its' tough for a company to keep impressing customers with everything that comes out of it. That is what google has been doing for a long time now. It really is impressive.
As a developer, I just HOPE that one day google takes a service like this and makes a long blog post out of it describing and bisecting every aspect of the app and how it was built. I'm tired of clicking 'view source' and finding nothing but minimized JS
A tip I found the other day is that in Chrome you can actually de-obfuscate minimized Javascript and throw break points in there if you'd like.
In Chrome 12 you just right click the scripts pane in the developer tools and click "De-obfuscate Source".
In Chrome 13 you navigate to the scripts pane and click the "{}" icon. I honestly have no idea why they got rid of the right click functionality, but it's incredibly useful for me.
I think that would create a sort of turtles all the way down situation. Google has so much internal proprietary technology infrastructure that it would be pretty difficult to provide a compelling explanation that doesn't have you wondering about how 10 other google services work (that you just learned about).
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this is how I feel every day :) it's a good feeling though!
"Just how quickly this was built (really, it was quick)"
Wouldn't this have to be thanks to their relatively recent ITA acquisition? Not too surprised since QPX runs a few popular websites such as Orbitz and Kayak.
(I'm not saying it's not a feat to do it in such little time as any project does take time, but I would like to see credit where due.)
No they want us to use their services because they make more money that way. And sure you have the choice of using competitors but let's be honest, Google has the option of always showing their own services in the #1 position in search results(i.e. search for any mortgage term).
And they also dominate any local keywords. Instead of going to the actual business's website, the first 10 results tend to be Google places.
Google wants to control all information. By being the defacto middle man between all businesses and their customers they are able to carve a large chunk of advertising dollars.
If the results Google gave me were not relevant to what I needed (and that includes linking to third parties over their own excellent properties) then I would use bing, or find something else which accommodates to my needs better. However, this is currently not the case. I can quickly search the local weather without going to any random site, do quick maths or conversions without effort, search journals and books without second thought etc...
ITA Software, acquired by Google in the last year, has always had this functionality available at [1]. In fact it is more full featured with ability to search international flight and a number of other options. There are even apps for iphone and android. This functionality pales in comparison to what is available there. I do not see the point of building this rather than have people use what is better and currently available.
"Just how quickly this was built (really, it was quick); and"
Sorry but not impressed, unless it was done overnight. Nothing special there, just copying from already done sites.
"2. Google wants you to use our services because they're compelling not because we don't give you any other choice (ie "Don't be evil")."
Yeah, that's why they keep filling the first page with in house junk that would NEVER make it without the Google advantage. I am already seeing adsense ads for this all over the web, how much does Google pay the webmasters for them?
General question here. Almost all flight search sites default the search dates to about 3 weeks out. Now, I find this annoying but I'm wondering if its done because there is statistical evidence that most customers search in that range of time, or rather if it's just what someone thought would be a good idea by "following their intuition".
The rule of thumb that I've heard was that anything about a month out represented the 'normal' price.
If you're buying a ticket for a flight less than a month away, the prices start to rise dramatically as the flight date draws nearer. But if you're buying a ticket for a flight more than a month away, it's more-or-less the same price as a flight that's a month away. [1]
So absent any other information, the 'normal' price can help people ballpark costs more quickly, something I'd expect to be statistically more common than actually searching to book a specific flight on specific dates.
[1] With exceptions for destinations with very defined/popular seasons, holidays and things like that.
It seems like the default search is just for people who want to see "about how much is a ticket between X and Y?" Anyone doing a real search has real dates. By placing the time frame a few weeks out, you avoid including very expensive last minute tickets, and do a better job getting general flight prices.
It depends on the kind of traveler (business travelers have shorter lead-time, leisure travelers have longer), but 3 weeks is a reasonable guess—probably on the shorter end—for what Google customers will be looking for.
Well this is some interesting research. Out of my off-hand and roughly scientific research, my statement of "almost all" was quite off.
I found that all of the major carrier websites I could remember off the top of my head did not employ the date-ahead practice.
Delta - no
US Airways - no
Southwest - no
Virgin America - no
Continental - no
I followed that by a Google search for "flight search" and checked the sites that came up in roughly the 1st and 2nd pages. Where I put "yes" and the date range, this date range was pre-populated.
Based on Google for "flight search"
Priceline - no
Travelocity - no
Kayak - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11
Expedia - no
Cheapflights - no
Flightsearch.com - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11
Tripadvisor - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11
Farebuzz.com - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11
http://www.skyscanner.com/ - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11
Finally, I checked YC's own Hipmunk, and they do not do it either.
Hipmunk - no
So my original statement was at least partly false. It doesn't seem like "almost all" after all. And the ones that I could find doing the date-ahead practice all had identical dates. I suspect all of them use the same backend search product.
I don't care enough at this point anymore to follow up on this anymore, so I'll leave it at that.
I cannot vouch for the other sites, but at Skyscanner we looked at the aggregated search history (12 million users a month) to make a best guess at the default dates to set.Interestingly the defaults we use are different for the mobile platforms. (We use our own backend technology)
Can you provide a little more detail on this? What percentage of users actually use the defaults (for both start and end date), and how many change it anyways?
Have you thought about doing some A/B testing on providing a default and not?
It probably is caching data from other people's searches, similar to what Kayak does. This is cool right up until you try to actually book a flight and it sells out or goes up in price dramatically.
Yes, you're looking at ITA's InstaSearch product, which delivers near real-time results, compared to the traditional QPX product.
There were many articles about Google's acquisition of ITA, and various stipulations around InstaSearch:
"As a condition of the deal, Google must continue to license ITA's QPX software for airfare websites on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms" through 2016. And it must commit to continued investment in ITA's QPX software and in ITA's unreleased InstaSearch product, which aims to provide near instant airline fare quotes."
The (well-hidden) "Limits" widget is a very cool bit of visual / visceral UI design. Click the "scatter graph" button next to the Duration field and you get a scatter plot of duration against price for all the flights - which is useful data in itself - then you can drag a boundary around to set the maximum duration or price.
Were those Southwest flights? I think SWA doesn't let any of the aggregators display prices for their flights - I was pleasantly surprised that I saw Southwest flights at all.
Great implementation. Recently I've been playing with skyscanner and HipMunk. This will definitely replace them for me when international support arrives.
It's quite scary that a company like Google can come along and shit in a startup's cereal practically overnight.
I know we were all rooting for The 'Munk, but it seems that Google's use of Price x Duration matrix effectively steals the thunder from Hipmunk's agony filter.
I mean, it's not as if Google needs the affiliate revenue, and I bet the Hipmunk guys would have preferred it had Google decided to "organise the world's information" through an acquisition. I think I'd need a good cry if this happened to me :(
It wasn't overnight. ITA has been doing flight search since forever. In fact, they even had the matrix UI before Hipmunk (though it wasn't featured as prominently):
No tears over here! We've known this was coming for almost a year—Google announced their ITA acquisition before we even launched. We've also been preparing some sweet responses :)
It’s rather powerful: as long as the origin airport is one of those shown on the map, and the destination airport is reachable via a domestic flight on one of the major airlines (AA, AS, B6, CO, DL, F9, UA, US), the search results come back instantaneously. Multiple origins and destinations (up to five of each) are supported as well:
And the results still come back immediately! Including the three-month chart of prices. This leads me to believe that Google/ITA has precomputed all of these results, and is simply serving these results out of a cache of some sort. That would explain why they are only offering a limited set of origin airports at this time: it probably takes an incredible amount of computing power and storage space to pre-calculate all of the possible results.
Interesting. That makes me wonder: would that really be the optimal approach? Google is able to return search results for previously unsearched queries nearly instantaneously too, so I'm wondering whether it's really a cache that's serving those queries. Would some sort of graph-based index be possible in this situation?
Lol. If I were Google, I'd probably have bought all the tickets in advance ;)
Thing that gets me is, do they really send their employees SFO to LA on United?! Southwest's like a third the price... And why isn't SW listed, anyway? Did Herb take issue with something here?
Probably for the same reason you don't see Southwest flights on any travel website. Southwest doesn't allow their flights to be booked outside of their website.
This information is a decade old, but my wife told me that Southwest were the only American airline to make a profit. That could have something to do with it...
EDIT: This recent news article states "Of the five biggest U.S. airline companies, analysts expected only Southwest to report a first-quarter profit":
From what I understand fuel contract hedging is a pretty standard part of airline business. Obviously hedging has potential to go the other way but it's unlikely to erode profit unless competitors are able to significantly compete on price and steal customers...
Well, if one narrows down the options a bit, it becomes far more tractable. Considering that Google's flight search only works for domestic return trips of 15 days or less (it didn't seem to give me results for anything longer than that?) and doesn't allow stopovers or open jaws, it's entirely possible that the complexity is much reduced.
What's interesting is that you linked to an ITA Software presentation, and Google own ITA Software. So it's almost certain that some of the people who put that document together worked on this pre-computed solution.
If I remember correctly, it's mentioned in Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach that this problem is not only hard but in fact formally undecidable in the general case.
Yes, using a shortest path tree [1], it is possible to efficiently (for some definition of "efficient") calculate the best path from a single origin node to all destination nodes in the graph. Dijkstra's algorithm is the standard implementation, but is not very amenable to parallel processing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google has a framework called Pregel [2] which does parallel graph processing. Their research paper outlines how it can be used to calculate a single-source shortest path tree (in section 5.2) in reasonable time.
It's odd that the limits are just in the data it seems, not in actual limit checks. So when you hit a limit, it's indistinguishable from there being no available flights... which seems very bad for UX.
I would think the limiting factor is availability. You can pre-compute valid fares between cities super-fast with sufficient computing power, but you're still (somewhat) limited by the rate at which you can update availability, which _still_ has to be polled from airline systems (to some degree) and can't give you answers in <400ms :)
I would think they can do the fare search/assembly in realtime with their infrastructure, but they're relying on cached availability, hence the limit to "popular US cities" at the moment, to keep caches fresh enough within the practical throughput limits.
Expanding on this, one of the things ITA/QPX comes with is a dirty big availability cache that's constantly being primed (and paid for) by their customers (ie: Kayak, Orbitz, et al), who are now ironically not getting any traffic from Google :)
Published airline fares change only a couple of times a day (10:30am, noon and 8pm), and only once a day on the weekends. Airlines (like American) are trying to push travel sites to use more dynamic pricing. The data is cached and outdated (including availability).
It doesn't take a tremendous amount of computing power -- remember that most airlines are still running ancient mainframe reservation systems.
The multiple destinations functionality was from ITA -- it's been around for years. Check out flyertalk.com for discussions -- you can input multiple layovers to have it compute cheap fares that maximize miles/segments. They keep a basic backend open at: matrix1.itasoftware.com
287 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadHipmunk's killer feature is the ability to easily visualize the flight in terms of the time you leave, the time you arrive and the time spent at various intermediate locations. It becomes more useful when there are no nonstop flights. Google is taking a different approach with their UI, which is fine.
In terms of whether I'd use google or hipmunk to search for flights in the future, I'd say that it depends on what my priorities are for that particular flight.
On the other hand, users are fickle and traffic can be a bit butterfly-effecty, so it's hard to predict the impact of something like this. That said, I don't expect Hipmunk to panic or take this lying down.
I like you.
This Google search interface is pretty nice, and makes a lot more sense than Hipmunk did.
Hipmunk gives me a "heat map" style presentation which I can understand multiple factors at once without scanning text:
Color = carrier / layovers
Line length = total travel duration
Timeline position = flight start/end time
Ordered by Agony (or whatever)
I can take one quick look and grasp all the flights without a second thought. In my opinion, Hipmunk's UI is genius where Google's looks like a school project.
Google's flight search doesn't look fun.
http://www.google.com/jobs/itasoftware/eng/ita-software-soft...
I guess when they are combined into /travel they will be internationalized.
A pity it only works within the US so far, but I'm sure they'll add international destinations eventually.
Also a shame that Southwest still won't cooperate with any of these guys. I guess it's a rational decision on their part: be cheapest most of the time and hope that people won't bother to compare your fares to others.
You also have one killer competitive advantage: an adorable logo.
Thanks for a great service.
Why clean clone? Gantt charts are (technically) 115 years old, and it's not like there are 5 billion ways to display a gantt chart, especially one with no paths. Other flight search startup have independently stumbled upon the idea of gantt charts for flight, why could that not be yet another independent reinvention?
> I'm sure it'll be a matter of time before that makes it into google's interface.
Or not, ITA does not seem to have met much success with their matrix so far.
When I say clone, I don't mean to imply they simply copied it with no originality - I'm just pointing out this fact to all the people who claim Hipmunk's advantage is their gantt view..which ITA already has a versin of and can be improved to match or be better than Hipmunk's.
That's what "cloning" implies though: making the exact same thing.
> I'm just pointing out this fact to all the people who claim Hipmunk's advantage is their gantt view..which ITA already has a versin of and can be improved to match or be better than Hipmunk's.
But have not so far, so Hipmunk's remains an advantage. You "could always" copy to match, in theory. Does not mean it's technically feasible, let alone easy. Or that you think it's a good idea.
What continues to impress me about Google is:
1. Just how quickly this was built (really, it was quick); and
2. Google wants you to use our services because they're compelling not because we don't give you any other choice (ie "Don't be evil").
Sure there are limits to what it currently does but I think you'll see it rapidly iterate.
I don't mean any offense, but the "Don't be evil" mantra is growing a bit tired. Evil is a strong word, and "not being evil" is a pretty low bar, IMO.
(i.e. the agent 'Google' is distinct from the agents that it is composed of)
See https://plus.google.com/100010618263697835406/posts/azTW8hvw... for details.
Ultimately, some policy on some random social networking site nobody uses is not much of a big deal. If you don't like the policy, don't use Google+. Easy.
It sounds less like it was ignored and more like it isn't a priority for a resource stretched team.
If Apple suddenly came out and said "right, from today on we want 75% of your sales instead of 30%" would you have the same reaction?
Google App Engine:
* Not the dominant hosting platform. Not even close to being the dominant.
* Maybe a million dollar product. Certainly not a billion dollar product.
* In beta/preview until just now with developers knowing pricing had not been set or could be changed.
* Optimizing your application properly can negate most if not all of the pricing increase.
* Open source alternative framework available if you want to keep using the same APIs.
Apple App Store:
* Dominant market position with only the Android Market coming close.
* Billion dollar product.
* Existed as fully launched for several years.
* Set percentage. You can't change it other then making your app free.
* No open source alternative that supports the same APIs.
Beta/preview products can and will change.
If profit is the only motivation for decisions at Google, why did it pull out of China? I'm sure you're cynical and wise about that too, but here's what I can tell you. I saw Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/interview-sergey-br...) and he got fiery and emotional about it. This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
I refer you to the comment above by jey
Although Sergey is an obviously important influence at Google, he is not Google.Not necessarily. To parrot one of the other posters here: saying it doesn't make it true.
You could also argue that being a charity would be a very slow and inefficient means to achieving many of the things Google has set out to do. Being a for-profit corp gets them there faster and with fewer distractions not core to their purpose. I'd even venture to guess that it wouldn't be possible for Google to do what it does as a non-profit.
Sure, profit is a motivation, but it's certainly not the only (or even necessarily primary) motivation.
http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
"That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work."
In any case, the parent doesn't have to justify anything, because he's stating a relatively well-known argument: in the US, there's an obligation for corporate executives to maximize shareholder value. This point is debated (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/corp...), but not to the extent that you're claiming.
Do you mean "why did they make a big rant about pulling out of China and then not actually do it until they were literally cyber-attacked by the government"? Google was never all that big in China anyway. I'm sure their whole strategy around this was to get gullible people to buy into the "Don't do evil" nonsense.
>Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview and he got fiery and emotional about it.
Yea? So do politicians. Very passionate about what they're talking about until it comes time to vote. Then they follow their wallets.
>This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
I know plenty of people who grew up in the Soviet Union. What exactly do you think goes on there that makes the "lucky few" who escape want to change the world? Maybe it did have some profound effect on him but it sounds more likely to be simple positioning. Getting people to think he really cares will cause them to defend him every time his company betrays that trust.
>This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
It may well be old and tired but it's how the world works. The only thing a CEO can get in trouble for not doing is increasing share holder value.
You've been conned.
I think the core of Google is Larry, Sergey, Urs, Craig, and the other dozens of engineers I've read about (never met), and from their actions and words over a course of a decade, I think they've proved that a huge motivator for them all is to simple make the world better.
They've all got lots of money. I think the long term evidence shows that they care about doing good. I think their motivation for earning money is to expand their own ability to do good.
If someone disagrees, instead of responding with more argument I'd ask you to make a table and list everything Google done has done in one column and whether or not it seems "good" or "evil" in another. Then we could debate further.
This is relevant to your statement, because while it's pretty much a requirement for a publicly held company to pursue profit at any cost, it's not necessarily the case for a company run by the people that have a disproportionately large number of votes on major issues.
I'm pretty sure they still have over 50% of the votes, so together they can decide how Google will handle tough moral issues without any support from other shareholders.
I would argue that it's entirely plausible that a couple altruistic billionaires will sacrifice a few dollars in pursuit of non-evil (their opinion of non-evil mind you).
"I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better."
I don't doubt that the people working at google want to make the world better and work on cool software. I don't think that is the primary motivation of google as a company.
Are you serious or trolling? I would expect if someone had such an ignorant/naive opinion they would at least be smart enough to not let other people know.
Here's what I see from google:
Search - a product that helps them sell ads
Gmail - a product that helps them sell ads
Google App engine - A platform where they used the hype of MapReduce et al to get people to join and then ramped up pricing drastically after a lot of people had been on the service (a service for which switching away almost certainly means a big rewrite) for years
Android - phone OS to help them sell ads.
I'm not seeing a lot of "make the world better" in there. Unless you mean "for Google executives".
Making money from selling things and leaving the user's data alone is just not in the DNA of this company.
I have always been amazed that some people would consider "don't be evil" to be a motto with any power to motivate or lead people, since it ventures no strong opinion, and points in no clear direction.
"Do good" is far more costly, less likely to be politically correct, and more likely to invite ridicule. At the same time, this kind of heart-on-sleeve sincerity has more power to inspire. Sincerity, humility, innocence tend to achieve more than cynicism and jaded worldly wisdom.
Should one treat others as one would like others to treat oneself? (the positive form)
Should one not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated? (the negative form)
I consider the maxim “Don't be evil” to be more actionable, useful, and meaningful than “Be good.”
So, uh... in hindsight I guess I'm just agreeing with you :-P
I thought about that in the wrong way.
What I really meant is it's just easier to not do evil. You can look at something and say "that's evil, so I won't do it". Sure, sometimes that can cause you hardship, but you deal with it. Maybe evil is an uncountable, but you don't need to count it. You just passively avoid options that are evil.
Doing good is harder. You have to actively seek out and choose good things to do from a huge set. That means attempting to enumerate at least part of that set. You have to figure out how to actually do those things. As a public corporation, you have to figure out how to do things and spin it as being in the company's best interests.
Weak leaders who don't do evil, but who also fail to do good, or fail to actively advocate and define doing good, are as much part of the problem because they fail in their responsibility of teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in matters of service.
You would only need to "spin it as being in the company's best interests" if the employer truly believes that business on any basis other than service is the most profitable.
In a town in which I expected from experience to encounter a few cockroaches during any visit to any restaurant, I would find that a reasonable, positive, encouraging message to advertise with.
When was the last time Google abused its set of patents to screw competition? There are so many ways in which Google can be evil, but it consciously chooses not to be.
Edit: Grammar
From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/google-settles-phar...
"Investigators snared Google's ad system by creating seven undercover websites offering prescription drugs to be sold without a prescription or the completion of an online medical questionnaire, Martin-Weis said. An undercover investigator informed Google employees creating the advertising for the products that they were manufactured overseas and did not require customers to have a valid prescription, she said. "In each instance, despite this knowledge, Google employees created a full advertising campaign for each of the undercover websites," Martin-Weis said."
What google did here was illegal and it paid the price for it, but I don't see anybody getting directly harmed by google's decision, it was not google selling the drugs themselves or that the drugs were not upto the standards.
Besides by the same reasoning google should block all the illegal torrent sites, or wikileaks for that matter. Always remember your truth is not everybody else's truth, and it is better that the world's leading search engine does not take sides for you.
Clearly Google can do no evil, because everything they do is good in your eyes. Next thing you'll tell me that collecting advertising for child porn, hitmen, or crack is fine too. They don't make moral judgments. Except in China when they're having problems -- then they're suddenly all about morality.
I love all the jerk-wad Google apologists downvoting this. Few companies I can stand less than this self-righteous company and its blind followers.
But, no, it's Google who are the benevolent ones! Why? Well because their motto says so, duh?
Your example of child porn and crack is taking it too far and I am sure no such thing will happen. But if you want google to be enforcing all the laws for you, then maybe it should also detect your location and disallow all merchants catering to gay marriages in the search results, in states where it is prohibited.
Also I don't agree with your generalist approach to corporations that they are all equally evil. I for one would prefer a corporation which makes a bold statement about its policies being non evil and one which is ready to be called upon when it goes astray its path, than one which makes no such claims. To me this is not self righteousness but self discipline.
A centralized database of individual's profiles is a much more dangerous tool. Google's efforts to destroy the idea of online privacy are much more dangerous to society.
And stupid lawsuits are not irrelevant to the society, they hamper competition which in turn hampers technological progress. If you think Samsung Galaxy Tab and Ipad look similar, just look again at their screens side by side the difference between PLS and IPS is day and night, it is unfortunate that the court does not deem that as differentiating enough.
Why is there a giant search bar at the top of the screen? I came here to look for flights, not to search the web.
Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen? I already know where I want to go. I don't need to look at a map to decide which destination I want. This part seems like more of a tech demo than anything.
The whole UI looks like it was designed by an engineer. For example when I want to book the flight, I get a tiny left/right arrow box-thing to increase the passenger count. Very poor choice of UI.
For example, I looked at a ticket from SEA -> SFO. When I zoomed in on SFO, I can easily see how much it is to San Jose or Oakland as well.
It's also just fun to enter your departure airport and see "where can I fly and for how much?"
This will be (if it isn't already) integrated with their search product. In other words, it'll be a part of search. You'll search for "flight from ny to sf" and that's what you'll see. Perfectly natural for them to have a consistent UI in their search product.
> Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen?
It's interactive. Try pulling the marker from one location to another. Very cool. I can also see the exact route that the flight will take. More intuitive.
I may have a general area of where I want to end up, but this lets you choose exactly where through a visual map. Again, very cool.
That's not the exact route the flight will take; it's the quickest (great circle) route. Airliners fly along airways.
I can also see the approximate route the flight will take, with layovers and other planned stops.
For me it just drags the map (Chrome 13.0.782.220 / OS X).
> I may have a general area of where I want to end up, but this lets you choose exactly where through a visual map. Again, very cool.
...is a map really helpful for this? How often do you want to go somewhere but not know the name? I'd rather they take all of that map space and use it for something else. I wouldn't mind something that says "hey, you could save $x on this flight if you went to $nearby_airport instead of the one you're on."
I'm on Chrome 15 (dev), which probably explains it.
> is a map really helpful for this?
I like maps. You never know what you'll notice on one.
Definitely. They could also just overlay that on the map like they do the popular destinations.
As a developer, I just HOPE that one day google takes a service like this and makes a long blog post out of it describing and bisecting every aspect of the app and how it was built. I'm tired of clicking 'view source' and finding nothing but minimized JS
In Chrome 12 you just right click the scripts pane in the developer tools and click "De-obfuscate Source".
In Chrome 13 you navigate to the scripts pane and click the "{}" icon. I honestly have no idea why they got rid of the right click functionality, but it's incredibly useful for me.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this is how I feel every day :) it's a good feeling though!
https://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Wouldn't this have to be thanks to their relatively recent ITA acquisition? Not too surprised since QPX runs a few popular websites such as Orbitz and Kayak.
(I'm not saying it's not a feat to do it in such little time as any project does take time, but I would like to see credit where due.)
And they also dominate any local keywords. Instead of going to the actual business's website, the first 10 results tend to be Google places.
Google wants to control all information. By being the defacto middle man between all businesses and their customers they are able to carve a large chunk of advertising dollars.
[1] http://matrix.itasoftware.com/
Sorry but not impressed, unless it was done overnight. Nothing special there, just copying from already done sites.
"2. Google wants you to use our services because they're compelling not because we don't give you any other choice (ie "Don't be evil")."
Yeah, that's why they keep filling the first page with in house junk that would NEVER make it without the Google advantage. I am already seeing adsense ads for this all over the web, how much does Google pay the webmasters for them?
The folks who are most interested in this app are the ones who are most likely interested in the above two points.
If you're buying a ticket for a flight less than a month away, the prices start to rise dramatically as the flight date draws nearer. But if you're buying a ticket for a flight more than a month away, it's more-or-less the same price as a flight that's a month away. [1]
So absent any other information, the 'normal' price can help people ballpark costs more quickly, something I'd expect to be statistically more common than actually searching to book a specific flight on specific dates.
[1] With exceptions for destinations with very defined/popular seasons, holidays and things like that.
I found that all of the major carrier websites I could remember off the top of my head did not employ the date-ahead practice.
Delta - no US Airways - no Southwest - no Virgin America - no Continental - no
I followed that by a Google search for "flight search" and checked the sites that came up in roughly the 1st and 2nd pages. Where I put "yes" and the date range, this date range was pre-populated.
Based on Google for "flight search" Priceline - no Travelocity - no Kayak - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 Expedia - no Cheapflights - no Flightsearch.com - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 Tripadvisor - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 Farebuzz.com - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11 http://www.skyscanner.com/ - yes 9/27/11-10/4/11
Finally, I checked YC's own Hipmunk, and they do not do it either.
Hipmunk - no
So my original statement was at least partly false. It doesn't seem like "almost all" after all. And the ones that I could find doing the date-ahead practice all had identical dates. I suspect all of them use the same backend search product.
I don't care enough at this point anymore to follow up on this anymore, so I'll leave it at that.
Have you thought about doing some A/B testing on providing a default and not?
There were many articles about Google's acquisition of ITA, and various stipulations around InstaSearch:
"As a condition of the deal, Google must continue to license ITA's QPX software for airfare websites on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms" through 2016. And it must commit to continued investment in ITA's QPX software and in ITA's unreleased InstaSearch product, which aims to provide near instant airline fare quotes."
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/article/22940...
Disclosure: I worked for ITA until rumors of the acquisition.
Give it 6 months or so.
That said, I can't really use it until it supports multiple destinations/open jaw in a single search.
Looks like it needs another QA pass.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479107
I know we were all rooting for The 'Munk, but it seems that Google's use of Price x Duration matrix effectively steals the thunder from Hipmunk's agony filter.
I mean, it's not as if Google needs the affiliate revenue, and I bet the Hipmunk guys would have preferred it had Google decided to "organise the world's information" through an acquisition. I think I'd need a good cry if this happened to me :(
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-company-that-HipMunk-copied...
http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=LAX,SFO,SEA,LAS,DEN;...
And the results still come back immediately! Including the three-month chart of prices. This leads me to believe that Google/ITA has precomputed all of these results, and is simply serving these results out of a cache of some sort. That would explain why they are only offering a limited set of origin airports at this time: it probably takes an incredible amount of computing power and storage space to pre-calculate all of the possible results.
Colour me impressed.
Thing that gets me is, do they really send their employees SFO to LA on United?! Southwest's like a third the price... And why isn't SW listed, anyway? Did Herb take issue with something here?
EDIT: This recent news article states "Of the five biggest U.S. airline companies, analysts expected only Southwest to report a first-quarter profit":
http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/story/2011/04/Southwest-m...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#Risk_managem...
http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
I'd love to know how Google's doing it - it's a really hard problem.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google has a framework called Pregel [2] which does parallel graph processing. Their research paper outlines how it can be used to calculate a single-source shortest path tree (in section 5.2) in reasonable time.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_tree
[2] http://www-bd.lip6.fr/ens/grbd2011/extra/SIGMOD10_pregel.pdf
http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=EWR,JFK,LGA;t=ORD;d=...
gives: Your search – New York to Chicago – did not match any results.
versus
http://www.kayak.com/#flights/NYC-ORD/2011-10-01/2011-11-01
1347 of 1347 roundtrips shown
http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=LGA;t=MYR;d=2011-09-...
No flights. However:
http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=LGA;t=ATL;d=2011-09-... http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=ATL;t=MYR;d=2011-09-...
One of the bits ITA/QPX got really right was smart availability caching (http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001880.html) -
I would think they can do the fare search/assembly in realtime with their infrastructure, but they're relying on cached availability, hence the limit to "popular US cities" at the moment, to keep caches fresh enough within the practical throughput limits.
And they have this: http://itasoftware.com/pdf/BrochurePDF_DACS.pdf
It doesn't take a tremendous amount of computing power -- remember that most airlines are still running ancient mainframe reservation systems.
The multiple destinations functionality was from ITA -- it's been around for years. Check out flyertalk.com for discussions -- you can input multiple layovers to have it compute cheap fares that maximize miles/segments. They keep a basic backend open at: matrix1.itasoftware.com