6 ms·

Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

316 points by alec 16y ago

Oxryly 16y ago
Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...
- ivenkys 16y ago
  More likely to be a combination of Python, C and/or Java. ITA uses a lot of C and Java as well.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    that mix would fit well at Google
- jrockway 16y ago
  I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    @smanek is a Lisper and worked for ITA a few years ago I believe so perhaps he'll chime in.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      smanek is way too busy with postabon to chime in, but I can tell you that half of #lisp on Freenode is idling from *.itasoftware.com
  - ynniv 16y ago
    I think that the useful parts (QPX) are still Lisp. IIRC python is more for integration and (their limited) front end.
  - sjbach 16y ago
    Not so. Most of QPX and RES is Lisp.
    - hga 16y ago
      As I understand it, C++ to maintain the QPX in-memory database and SBCL to do the routing magic (which is even more non-trivial than you might think, e.g. a "best" result set is not 20 routes that are all within a dollar and that hit the same airports, etc. etc.). RES uses Clozure CL (formerly OpenMCL, an evolution of Macintosh Common Lisp) for the stateless middleware with Oracle RAC for the backend and Java with the usual libraries for the web front end.
      - sjbach 16y ago
        I'm a current ITAer working on QPX -- by lines of code, QPX is probably actually split pretty evenly between C++ and Lisp. But accounting for verbosity of C++, the logic is heavily on the Lisp side. I think anyone on my team would consider himself to be a Lisp developer before anything else.
        KirinDave 16y ago
        It's so good to hear this. I'm always afraid that Python is going to squeeze out Lisp. It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive.
        dan00 16y ago
        "It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive." I think that it's less about learning, because Python is way more similar to languages like Java or C++. Using Python, they have to learn less. Than they discover some cool new features in Python and are bought. Then they don't see any need to bother further with lisp.
        16y ago
  - wglb 16y ago
    Unlikely that they will go away from lisp. They are heavy users of SBCL (performance) and CCL (fast compile) and have some interesting fraction of a million lines of lisp code and might just be one of the larger employers of lisp programmers. See http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-brandon-werner http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-br...
    - strlen 16y ago
      It also isn't a "location based application that lets you casually hookup with your friends" that used to be acquired in droves 2005-2008. This is a serious and existing, profitable business with a serious and scalable technology platform and experienced talent. Not just ambitious and smart college kids getting a slightly higher hiring bonus (not that there's anything wrong with that). The critical infrastructure pieces (where GC is an issue) are already in C++. The front-end is already in Java. A full scale re-write will be a dumb thing to do. It's not going to be difficult to have Common Lisp FFI to hook the ITA middleware into Google's infrastructure instead of ITA's. The software that ITA developers that makes them different from the rest (I am guessing lots of these are heuristic solutions to NP complete problems) is exactly the sweet spot for Common Lisp, where it provides a significant advantage over other languages even for large groups of programmers. While I will enjoy writing a web app in Common Lisp much more so than writing a web app in Java (less boiler plate, interesting language compensates for a mundane task) I doubt there are going to be great advantages to doing the more routine development in CL for a large corporation.
      - wallflower 16y ago
        > The software that ITA developers that makes them different from the rest Classic paper by Carl de Marcken, co-founder and former CTO of ITA Software, elaborating the unique domain problems of air travel planning: "Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning" http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
      - sedachv 16y ago
        "The critical infrastructure pieces (where GC is an issue) are already in C++." When did this happen? From what I heard last, C++ was just the data importer that dumped everything into mmapped buffers which SBCL worked on.
  - brlewis 16y ago
    A tip I picked up from one of pg's essays for finding out what technology a company uses: look at their job listings; they don't lie. In the "Operations" part of the company it appears you're right, "most work is in Python": http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167 http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167 In "Engineering", Lisp tops the "particularly valuable" list at the bottom of "Knowledge and Skills" for http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130 http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130 Farther down the same page they ask you to solve puzzles. "Puzzles submitted in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because those are the languages we use every day"
    - lg 16y ago
      we should add ruby to that.
      - gnuvince 16y ago
        We really shouldn't.
        outotrai 16y ago
        If you (or someone else) wouldn't mind taking the time to explain it, I'd really like to know why your unsupported and vaguely anti-Ruby statement is so popular. I'm assuming that it means that the problems with Ruby are so widely known that you don't even need to spell them out in order for people to agree with you, but I guess I didn't get the memo. Why "really shouldn't" we? (Serious question - thanks.)
        lispm 16y ago
        One thing, of all the dynamic languages the default Ruby implementation is by far the slowest. For anything that is slighty computational expensive, the default Ruby implementation is poor. Also think green, if you have lots of computation in a slow language, that easily adds up in a large data center in form of wasted electricity, which adds to cooling and is generally expensive. Some Ruby implementations try to get in the direction of, say, a Lisp implementation like SBCL - which is used by ITA. SBCL provides since quite some time a compiler that can generate reasonably fast code.
jey 16y ago
Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.
- staunch 16y ago
  The price does seem relatively low. ITA's revenues are probably not very significant for Google, so they may be buying purely for the team and technology. And for a team and technology acquisition $700M is pretty huge.
- vessenes 16y ago
  I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did. I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.
  - jey 16y ago
    They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price. This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - amirmc 16y ago
    Returning 2x might also be a good thing for the VCs too. I assume, getting some liquidity back is probably important to them in the current climate.
    - 16y ago
mkramlich 16y ago
gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)
- bkrausz 16y ago
  They also power most of the meta search sites, which Google is easily positioned to become (and link to actual OTAs for booking). Huge conflict of interest. However, ITA is not the only option out there, and given the concerns I bet everyone has with their contracts there's now room for another data provider to jump in and snatch up contracts during renegotiations. A general rule of thumb I find valid is if there's some consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of computation, Google will get into it. They certainly have the infrastructure for it. (I'm a former TripAdvisor Flights engineer, which is owned by Expedia)
- rwhitman 16y ago
  There goes the neighborhood...
- symesc 16y ago
  I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already? My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that Google can do to really change things beyond how ITA already has?
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    A Google buyout of ITA could improve things in one simple area: resources. As in, way way more. Hardware and cash. Even if Google made no significant changes to the behavior of ITA's existing code, if they instead just tweaked it to run on say millions of cores, highly distributed and parallelized in Google data centers, with gajillions of cached results -- endusers would probably be able to see better, fresher, more "long tail-y & last mile-y" and faster results. I'm just making an educated guess here, I could be wrong if there's some fundamental bottleneck in the ITA architecture I haven't considered (and someone chime in if you know that to be the case) but I don't think this will be an issue.
adatta02 16y ago
strong move - shot across the bow at Bing/Farecast. I wonder where we'll start seeing integrations.
pinko 16y ago
ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but few people have heard of. Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything else on the web in terms of travel search. Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.
- cadr 16y ago
  What are the others?
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    He could tell you but then Google would have to buy them out. :)
- JimmyL 16y ago
  Agree - I travel to some obscure places, and Matrix is about the only online aggregator out there that goes down to the level of sub-regional airline. It also displays (especially in that graphical view) routings that exist, but that the more mainstream travel sites won't advertise - things that there is no reason for a normal person to do, but which can be incredibly handy if used well. There's no business reason to, but if they managed to integrate data from SeatCounter into that view, it would rock my world.
mkramlich 16y ago
This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)
- jsz0 16y ago
  I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be successful there.
  - SkyMarshal 16y ago
    Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google. And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.
    - hga 16y ago
      How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.
      - _delirium 16y ago
        Dodgeball's a commonly cited failure. The founders left two years after being acquired to start a very similar competitor, which even has a hilariously similar name (Foursquare), and then Google discontinued Dodgeball two years after that.
      - 16y ago
Alex3917 16y ago
Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50 miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time for an answer if I potentially stand to save a couple hundred bucks.
- eru 16y ago
  And you don't even need the cheapest option. Anything within 10$ of the cheapest option is probably OK. (Allowing approximations make the problem easier, at least in theory.)
- alec 16y ago
  I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com http://matrix2.itasoftware.com, put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front page.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    Ahh, thanks for pointing that out. Searching for near SFO to near ITO in August returns flights for over $100 cheaper than what Kayak is showing. (Now I just wish I could actually go.)
  - kiwidrew 16y ago
    I assume that doing these radius searches requires far more computational power than a "simple" single-origin/single-destination search, which surely must translate into a higher cost-per-query for QPX customers. Is this perhaps why very few QPX-powered sites actually offer the option?
    - deleted 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
blackswan 16y ago
Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead? Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.
dryicerx 16y ago
Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future assuming Google will take this to a whole new level. I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz
- alanh 16y ago
  Why would you assume Google would provide a good user experience here?
- mkramlich 16y ago
  In the near term, may be no major impact (visible to their respective users anyway, though there will be ripples under the hood.) Longer term, generally some flavor of bad. However, as others have mentioned, one silver lining in this event is that it may increase demand for some sort of pseudo-ITA replacement company upstart to slide in sideways and takeover providing this service. Perhaps new ventures will be formed to do exactly this. But there will also be chilling effects on other enterprises and projects. So it's really hard to say. It definitely takes Google one step closer to a position where they can make Kayak/Orbitz-like sites a little more irrelevant. Are they all the way there yet? Of course not. Also, Google has a track record of being pretty shitty in certain areas (like customer service, especially human contact, voices and bodies, etc.) and so those are areas where they can still differentiate. Plus, there's still no sign of Google wanting to get into taking the booking orders. Just the fare/trip search. Search of any kind is something that clearly their infrastructure and scale is going to have massive competitive advantages in delivering. Booking: not really. And many OTA's and metasearch sites make their profit on booking fees and kickbacks, not really on search itself, which for them is more of a cost center (though they do sometimes monetize those use cases too in various ways as well -- this is where they will hurt the most, in medium term). Also, Google has said it plans to honor the existing ITA contracts. But who knows how long or how pervasive that will be in the future. I personally know of one startup that came very close to signing a contract to get service from ITA and we actually backed down ultimately, in part, because of the fear of lock-in to their service. Plus they were expensive. ITA is/was a bit like the Oracle of fare search products. Good shit, but really expensive shit. At least for a wee little startup.
jamesshamenski 16y ago
Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic. Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
- hga 16y ago
  Huh? How is this content? QPX is "searching" on airline provided content. OK, you could say that a QPX suggested route is content, but it's algorithmically built from on the fly constantly updated airline content. Very much like classical Google web search.
  - jfno67 16y ago
    You are right, it's not content. But currently many OTA have not much more to offer as content. The OTAs are pouring huge amount of money to get those reservations made on their site. Do you think that Expedia and the rest are thrilled to see this move by Google. The OTA have stopped the disintermediation at consolidation and economy of scale, now they will have to go farther or someone else will.
- jojopotato 16y ago
  Google already has had a soft entrance to the hotel business through Google Maps: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-show-hotel-prices-on.html http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-sho...
- c1sc0 16y ago
  I'm working for kind of a big travel portal and yes, we are shitting ourselves to the point that at least I am considering switching industries. I'm not even sure they did it for the content as much as for access to the raw data.
  - hga 16y ago
    Raw, massaged data. From everything we've been reading ("the industry worships syntax, not semantics"), turning those data flows into something comprehensible is a major trick. ITA's start in this reminds me of the FU MIT delivered to Xerox when MIT bought their first big mainframe Xerox laser printer in the early '80s. Xerox wanted $100K to reveal the format, so instead a group just took one or more output tapes (a normal data flow was the mainframe wrote to tape and the printer read them) and decoded it.
vlad 16y ago
From the FAQ: ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site. That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel. http://matrix2.itasoftware.com http://matrix2.itasoftware.com
- amirmc 16y ago
  That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was something like that for a while. I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).
  - bl4k 16y ago
    Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the travel market pronto
    - teamonkey 16y ago
      I would expect it to be fully integrated into Google Maps. You can already find a route from A to B using other forms of public transport.
  - pjob 16y ago
    Bing has been doing something like this for a little while now (through their acquisition of farecast.) Check it out: http://www.bing.com/travel/flight/flexibleTravel?dm=07%2F02%2F2010&p=1&tvl_t=graph&form=FORMTRVLGENERIC&o=BOS&e=LAS http://www.bing.com/travel/flight/flexibleTravel?dm=07%2F02%...
- kiwidrew 16y ago
  Although it's a bit of a reach to say that they "market" matrix/matrix2... It isn't terribly nice to use, they don't actively promote it, and they don't allocate it very much processing power. That being said, I have always gotten the impression that they maintain it as a sort of testbed -- a huge number of Flyertalkers use matrix for very esoteric queries, and I'd imagine the feedback that ITA gets from those users is invaluable.
mmaunder 16y ago
If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ (Watch the video. It's priceless) Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries. So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.
- VMG 16y ago
  a very microsofty video indeed
mhp 16y ago
Antitrust?
alanh 16y ago
> Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online. FEWER THAN HALF? Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?
- ben1040 16y ago
  Corporate travel agents make up the majority of the other half, I bet.
  - alalonde 16y ago
    Yes, corporate travel is a huge market, but service companies like Christopherson are probably becoming less relevant in light of all this new competition. Wouldn't be surprised if Google took this on..
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Old people. People not into computers, or afraid of them, or who do not have a computer period.
- smackfu 16y ago
  Also, package tours and cruises often include airline tickets and they are usually still booked through travel agents (or via the operator's website which I doubt counts as online airline sales).
- zandorg 16y ago
  My Mum was going online for flights yesterday (though she's never been one to go to a travel agent). I pointed her to Orbitz. She was impressed, but another (UK-based) website she'd tried was $200 cheaper than anything on Orbitz. Not sure why.
petdog 16y ago
Some funded sbcl work would be good.
alexdong 16y ago
I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money. Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain. I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of (needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any desktop software market that has a rapid growth. There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between "who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better? Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.
- hga 16y ago
  Perhaps ... but this does fit very well with their stated mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (End of first paragraph at http://www.google.com/corporate/ http://www.google.com/corporate/) There are at least two dimensions to this: "organize and make accessible and useful" and "the world's information". You're complaining about inadequacies in the former, this is a move to expand on the latter. Hmmm, for that matter, they're buying some brainpower that could help them with your specific complaint but also the "organize and make accessible and useful" part of their mission in general.
- jmount 16y ago
  "I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to give away. A very different world than now.
hga 16y ago
Dan Weinreb has made some comments on the acquisition, the future of Lisp at ITA/Google, etc.: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299

316 points by alec 16y ago

Oxryly 16y ago

Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...

ivenkys 16y ago
More likely to be a combination of Python, C and/or Java. ITA uses a lot of C and Java as well.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  that mix would fit well at Google
jrockway 16y ago
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  @smanek is a Lisper and worked for ITA a few years ago I believe so perhaps he'll chime in.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    smanek is way too busy with postabon to chime in, but I can tell you that half of #lisp on Freenode is idling from *.itasoftware.com
- ynniv 16y ago
  I think that the useful parts (QPX) are still Lisp. IIRC python is more for integration and (their limited) front end.
- sjbach 16y ago
  Not so. Most of QPX and RES is Lisp.
  - hga 16y ago
    As I understand it, C++ to maintain the QPX in-memory database and SBCL to do the routing magic (which is even more non-trivial than you might think, e.g. a "best" result set is not 20 routes that are all within a dollar and that hit the same airports, etc. etc.). RES uses Clozure CL (formerly OpenMCL, an evolution of Macintosh Common Lisp) for the stateless middleware with Oracle RAC for the backend and Java with the usual libraries for the web front end.
    - sjbach 16y ago
      I'm a current ITAer working on QPX -- by lines of code, QPX is probably actually split pretty evenly between C++ and Lisp. But accounting for verbosity of C++, the logic is heavily on the Lisp side. I think anyone on my team would consider himself to be a Lisp developer before anything else.
      - KirinDave 16y ago
        It's so good to hear this. I'm always afraid that Python is going to squeeze out Lisp. It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive.
        dan00 16y ago
        "It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive." I think that it's less about learning, because Python is way more similar to languages like Java or C++. Using Python, they have to learn less. Than they discover some cool new features in Python and are bought. Then they don't see any need to bother further with lisp.
        16y ago
- wglb 16y ago
  Unlikely that they will go away from lisp. They are heavy users of SBCL (performance) and CCL (fast compile) and have some interesting fraction of a million lines of lisp code and might just be one of the larger employers of lisp programmers. See http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-brandon-werner http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-br...
  - strlen 16y ago
    It also isn't a "location based application that lets you casually hookup with your friends" that used to be acquired in droves 2005-2008. This is a serious and existing, profitable business with a serious and scalable technology platform and experienced talent. Not just ambitious and smart college kids getting a slightly higher hiring bonus (not that there's anything wrong with that). The critical infrastructure pieces (where GC is an issue) are already in C++. The front-end is already in Java. A full scale re-write will be a dumb thing to do. It's not going to be difficult to have Common Lisp FFI to hook the ITA middleware into Google's infrastructure instead of ITA's. The software that ITA developers that makes them different from the rest (I am guessing lots of these are heuristic solutions to NP complete problems) is exactly the sweet spot for Common Lisp, where it provides a significant advantage over other languages even for large groups of programmers. While I will enjoy writing a web app in Common Lisp much more so than writing a web app in Java (less boiler plate, interesting language compensates for a mundane task) I doubt there are going to be great advantages to doing the more routine development in CL for a large corporation.
    - wallflower 16y ago
      > The software that ITA developers that makes them different from the rest Classic paper by Carl de Marcken, co-founder and former CTO of ITA Software, elaborating the unique domain problems of air travel planning: "Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning" http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
    - sedachv 16y ago
      "The critical infrastructure pieces (where GC is an issue) are already in C++." When did this happen? From what I heard last, C++ was just the data importer that dumped everything into mmapped buffers which SBCL worked on.
- brlewis 16y ago
  A tip I picked up from one of pg's essays for finding out what technology a company uses: look at their job listings; they don't lie. In the "Operations" part of the company it appears you're right, "most work is in Python": http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167 http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167 In "Engineering", Lisp tops the "particularly valuable" list at the bottom of "Knowledge and Skills" for http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130 http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130 Farther down the same page they ask you to solve puzzles. "Puzzles submitted in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because those are the languages we use every day"
  - lg 16y ago
    we should add ruby to that.
    - gnuvince 16y ago
      We really shouldn't.
      - outotrai 16y ago
        If you (or someone else) wouldn't mind taking the time to explain it, I'd really like to know why your unsupported and vaguely anti-Ruby statement is so popular. I'm assuming that it means that the problems with Ruby are so widely known that you don't even need to spell them out in order for people to agree with you, but I guess I didn't get the memo. Why "really shouldn't" we? (Serious question - thanks.)
        lispm 16y ago
        One thing, of all the dynamic languages the default Ruby implementation is by far the slowest. For anything that is slighty computational expensive, the default Ruby implementation is poor. Also think green, if you have lots of computation in a slow language, that easily adds up in a large data center in form of wasted electricity, which adds to cooling and is generally expensive. Some Ruby implementations try to get in the direction of, say, a Lisp implementation like SBCL - which is used by ITA. SBCL provides since quite some time a compiler that can generate reasonably fast code.

jey 16y ago

Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.

staunch 16y ago
The price does seem relatively low. ITA's revenues are probably not very significant for Google, so they may be buying purely for the team and technology. And for a team and technology acquisition $700M is pretty huge.
vessenes 16y ago
I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did. I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.
- jey 16y ago
  They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price. This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.
  - deleted 16y ago
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- amirmc 16y ago
  Returning 2x might also be a good thing for the VCs too. I assume, getting some liquidity back is probably important to them in the current climate.
  - 16y ago

mkramlich 16y ago

gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

bkrausz 16y ago
They also power most of the meta search sites, which Google is easily positioned to become (and link to actual OTAs for booking). Huge conflict of interest. However, ITA is not the only option out there, and given the concerns I bet everyone has with their contracts there's now room for another data provider to jump in and snatch up contracts during renegotiations. A general rule of thumb I find valid is if there's some consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of computation, Google will get into it. They certainly have the infrastructure for it. (I'm a former TripAdvisor Flights engineer, which is owned by Expedia)
rwhitman 16y ago
There goes the neighborhood...
symesc 16y ago
I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already? My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that Google can do to really change things beyond how ITA already has?
- mkramlich 16y ago
  A Google buyout of ITA could improve things in one simple area: resources. As in, way way more. Hardware and cash. Even if Google made no significant changes to the behavior of ITA's existing code, if they instead just tweaked it to run on say millions of cores, highly distributed and parallelized in Google data centers, with gajillions of cached results -- endusers would probably be able to see better, fresher, more "long tail-y & last mile-y" and faster results. I'm just making an educated guess here, I could be wrong if there's some fundamental bottleneck in the ITA architecture I haven't considered (and someone chime in if you know that to be the case) but I don't think this will be an issue.

adatta02 16y ago

strong move - shot across the bow at Bing/Farecast. I wonder where we'll start seeing integrations.

pinko 16y ago

ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but few people have heard of. Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything else on the web in terms of travel search. Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.

cadr 16y ago
What are the others?
- mkramlich 16y ago
  He could tell you but then Google would have to buy them out. :)
JimmyL 16y ago
Agree - I travel to some obscure places, and Matrix is about the only online aggregator out there that goes down to the level of sub-regional airline. It also displays (especially in that graphical view) routings that exist, but that the more mainstream travel sites won't advertise - things that there is no reason for a normal person to do, but which can be incredibly handy if used well. There's no business reason to, but if they managed to integrate data from SeatCounter into that view, it would rock my world.

mkramlich 16y ago

This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)

jsz0 16y ago
I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be successful there.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google. And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.
  - hga 16y ago
    How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Dodgeball's a commonly cited failure. The founders left two years after being acquired to start a very similar competitor, which even has a hilariously similar name (Foursquare), and then Google discontinued Dodgeball two years after that.
    - 16y ago

Alex3917 16y ago

Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50 miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time for an answer if I potentially stand to save a couple hundred bucks.

eru 16y ago
And you don't even need the cheapest option. Anything within 10$ of the cheapest option is probably OK. (Allowing approximations make the problem easier, at least in theory.)
alec 16y ago
I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com http://matrix2.itasoftware.com, put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front page.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Ahh, thanks for pointing that out. Searching for near SFO to near ITO in August returns flights for over $100 cheaper than what Kayak is showing. (Now I just wish I could actually go.)
- kiwidrew 16y ago
  I assume that doing these radius searches requires far more computational power than a "simple" single-origin/single-destination search, which surely must translate into a higher cost-per-query for QPX customers. Is this perhaps why very few QPX-powered sites actually offer the option?
  - deleted 16y ago

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blackswan 16y ago

Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead? Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.

dryicerx 16y ago

Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future assuming Google will take this to a whole new level. I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz

alanh 16y ago
Why would you assume Google would provide a good user experience here?
mkramlich 16y ago
In the near term, may be no major impact (visible to their respective users anyway, though there will be ripples under the hood.) Longer term, generally some flavor of bad. However, as others have mentioned, one silver lining in this event is that it may increase demand for some sort of pseudo-ITA replacement company upstart to slide in sideways and takeover providing this service. Perhaps new ventures will be formed to do exactly this. But there will also be chilling effects on other enterprises and projects. So it's really hard to say. It definitely takes Google one step closer to a position where they can make Kayak/Orbitz-like sites a little more irrelevant. Are they all the way there yet? Of course not. Also, Google has a track record of being pretty shitty in certain areas (like customer service, especially human contact, voices and bodies, etc.) and so those are areas where they can still differentiate. Plus, there's still no sign of Google wanting to get into taking the booking orders. Just the fare/trip search. Search of any kind is something that clearly their infrastructure and scale is going to have massive competitive advantages in delivering. Booking: not really. And many OTA's and metasearch sites make their profit on booking fees and kickbacks, not really on search itself, which for them is more of a cost center (though they do sometimes monetize those use cases too in various ways as well -- this is where they will hurt the most, in medium term). Also, Google has said it plans to honor the existing ITA contracts. But who knows how long or how pervasive that will be in the future. I personally know of one startup that came very close to signing a contract to get service from ITA and we actually backed down ultimately, in part, because of the fear of lock-in to their service. Plus they were expensive. ITA is/was a bit like the Oracle of fare search products. Good shit, but really expensive shit. At least for a wee little startup.

jamesshamenski 16y ago

Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic. Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.

hga 16y ago
Huh? How is this content? QPX is "searching" on airline provided content. OK, you could say that a QPX suggested route is content, but it's algorithmically built from on the fly constantly updated airline content. Very much like classical Google web search.
- jfno67 16y ago
  You are right, it's not content. But currently many OTA have not much more to offer as content. The OTAs are pouring huge amount of money to get those reservations made on their site. Do you think that Expedia and the rest are thrilled to see this move by Google. The OTA have stopped the disintermediation at consolidation and economy of scale, now they will have to go farther or someone else will.
jojopotato 16y ago
Google already has had a soft entrance to the hotel business through Google Maps: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-show-hotel-prices-on.html http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-sho...
c1sc0 16y ago
I'm working for kind of a big travel portal and yes, we are shitting ourselves to the point that at least I am considering switching industries. I'm not even sure they did it for the content as much as for access to the raw data.
- hga 16y ago
  Raw, massaged data. From everything we've been reading ("the industry worships syntax, not semantics"), turning those data flows into something comprehensible is a major trick. ITA's start in this reminds me of the FU MIT delivered to Xerox when MIT bought their first big mainframe Xerox laser printer in the early '80s. Xerox wanted $100K to reveal the format, so instead a group just took one or more output tapes (a normal data flow was the mainframe wrote to tape and the printer read them) and decoded it.

vlad 16y ago

From the FAQ: ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site. That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel. http://matrix2.itasoftware.com http://matrix2.itasoftware.com

amirmc 16y ago
That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was something like that for a while. I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).
- bl4k 16y ago
  Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the travel market pronto
  - teamonkey 16y ago
    I would expect it to be fully integrated into Google Maps. You can already find a route from A to B using other forms of public transport.
- pjob 16y ago
  Bing has been doing something like this for a little while now (through their acquisition of farecast.) Check it out: http://www.bing.com/travel/flight/flexibleTravel?dm=07%2F02%2F2010&p=1&tvl_t=graph&form=FORMTRVLGENERIC&o=BOS&e=LAS http://www.bing.com/travel/flight/flexibleTravel?dm=07%2F02%...
kiwidrew 16y ago
Although it's a bit of a reach to say that they "market" matrix/matrix2... It isn't terribly nice to use, they don't actively promote it, and they don't allocate it very much processing power. That being said, I have always gotten the impression that they maintain it as a sort of testbed -- a huge number of Flyertalkers use matrix for very esoteric queries, and I'd imagine the feedback that ITA gets from those users is invaluable.

mmaunder 16y ago

If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ (Watch the video. It's priceless) Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries. So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.

VMG 16y ago
a very microsofty video indeed

mhp 16y ago

Antitrust?

alanh 16y ago

> Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online. FEWER THAN HALF? Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?

ben1040 16y ago
Corporate travel agents make up the majority of the other half, I bet.
- alalonde 16y ago
  Yes, corporate travel is a huge market, but service companies like Christopherson are probably becoming less relevant in light of all this new competition. Wouldn't be surprised if Google took this on..
mkramlich 16y ago
Old people. People not into computers, or afraid of them, or who do not have a computer period.
smackfu 16y ago
Also, package tours and cruises often include airline tickets and they are usually still booked through travel agents (or via the operator's website which I doubt counts as online airline sales).
zandorg 16y ago
My Mum was going online for flights yesterday (though she's never been one to go to a travel agent). I pointed her to Orbitz. She was impressed, but another (UK-based) website she'd tried was $200 cheaper than anything on Orbitz. Not sure why.

petdog 16y ago

Some funded sbcl work would be good.

alexdong 16y ago

I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money. Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain. I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of (needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any desktop software market that has a rapid growth. There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between "who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better? Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.

hga 16y ago
Perhaps ... but this does fit very well with their stated mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (End of first paragraph at http://www.google.com/corporate/ http://www.google.com/corporate/) There are at least two dimensions to this: "organize and make accessible and useful" and "the world's information". You're complaining about inadequacies in the former, this is a move to expand on the latter. Hmmm, for that matter, they're buying some brainpower that could help them with your specific complaint but also the "organize and make accessible and useful" part of their mission in general.
jmount 16y ago
"I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to give away. A very different world than now.

hga 16y ago

Dan Weinreb has made some comments on the acquisition, the future of Lisp at ITA/Google, etc.: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299