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Google to launch flight search service soon
- inportb 15y agoAh... but would it be better than Hipmunk?
- donkeykong 15y agoI smell fresh acquisitions in the air.
- gfodor 15y agoOr, another failed startup. This is the scary road you tread when you're in a space that might raise the eyebrows of a company like Google. High risk, high reward. I wish them luck!
- DannoHung 15y agoYeah, Hipmunk is really great. The experience is so good I actually sort of wish I flew more often... or at least had to schedule flights more often. It'd be cool if they could handle other itinerary and reservation tasks. Though I don't know how they'd necessarily make money like that.
- inportb 15y agoWell, the money's in hotel reservations, so I guess it's in the pipeline.
- shii 15y agoExactly, which I'm curious if GOOG will incorporate hotel reservations in it all. Man Google has it covered. I'm trying hard to think of an online space they're not in.
- inportb 15y agoI guess you gotta start thinking offline, then. inb4 Google buys your company ;p
- jojopotato 15y agoActually google does hotel pricing already in maps. It's not super obvious, but do a search for "hotels in San francisco" and you should see some prices
- covercash 15y agoHipmunk already does hotels: http://www.hipmunk.com/hotels http://www.hipmunk.com/hotels
- Hovertruck 15y agoI tried Hipmunk for the first time last week. I really enjoyed searching flights by "agony". Unfortunately I learned the hard way that all Delta flights should be put at the very end of the list when sorted in such a way.
- hackinthebochs 15y agoMan, the arbitrary downvoting on HN is starting to get out of control. (downvote away)
- ctingom 15y agoCurious to see the customer service aspect of the airline booking business.
- make_lemonade 15y agoHipmunk looks similar to ITA Software's flight search tool, so it'll be interesting to see Google's take. If Google builds it, they will come.
- tnorthcutt 15y agoTo paraphrase Steven Tyler, they won't have to come - they're already there.
- tectonic 15y agoI really hope they have smart combinatoric search. I want to be able to search flexible day, flexible airport, multi-leg world travel trips without making my own spreadsheet. Some services do flexible day, some do flexible airport, but I haven't found any that provide these with a multi-leg itinerary. I'm sure this is due to the computational complexity, but Google could handle it.
- magic_haze 15y agoBoth OAG and Innovata provide a dump of all possible flight schedules for the next few months (which includes multiple legs and airlines). It is trivial to add the multiple day/airport feature: I've had a vanilla mysql install (on a P4 with a 1gig ram - my dev machine, sadly) return exactly the sort of stuff you mentioned in less than 100ms, so I'm sure the computational complexity is pretty irrelevant at Google's scale.
- tectonic 15y agoIs any of that data free/cheap for experimentation?
- magic_haze 15y agoA co-founder of the company I did the work for had a few contacts in both companies, so we were able to secure the data through them. It definitely isn't publicly available, but I imagine if you talked to a regional representative at either company, you could get them to generate a sample data dump for you (a gigantic CSV file, for example) Kayak used to have a free API, but they shut it down "because of constly misuse". I'm not aware of any other service that's targeted at individual developers - most of these APIs are intended for huge companies with correspondingly deep pockets.
- alec 15y agoITA's Matrix beta site (http://matrix.itasoftware.com http://matrix.itasoftware.com) does both flexible day and flexible airport for multi-leg trips. To do multiple airports, type in the airport codes separated by commas: "lax,sfo".
- ujjvala 15y agoGoogle might acquire Hipmunk which already uses GWT.
- sp332 15y agoI wonder if it will have Google+ integration from day one. Planning vacations together, or making sure you're never in the same town as someone? Maybe timing your visit to coincide with a candidate's campaign, or "facilitating serendipity" with people who will be at your destination at the same time. With circles and sparks, this could get real interesting....
- derrida 15y agoWow. This is going to be interesting. Adioso.com (YC) is an amazing site, Google are going to have to try pretty hard to beat them for Australia, considering what Adioso.com can do without buying out a massive company.