17 ms·

Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Matrix flight search app

407 points by hnburnsy 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago
I want to search for a flight with as many multi-day stops as possible, while keeping the price low. Whenever there is a stopover, I'd like it to be 24 hours plus, so I can explore that city. Ie. give me the most circuitous route, so I can explore the world. Yet nobody seems to have done this.
- evacchi 5y ago
  I don't know how good is but you may want to look at airwander.com
- krrrh 5y ago
  You can do this sort of thing in ITA Matrix, it still takes a lot of work to craft the itinerary and learn the syntax, but I have used it to do exactly what you suggest, and found cheap 36 hour bonus stayovers.
syngrog66 5y ago
ITA for a long time was the "poster boy" exemplar case whenever anyone asked whether Lisp was being used for anything big in the real world. I worked for Orbitz during the era when ITA was still independent, and we used their flight search software in our backend. ("QPX" might have been its product name, that used Lisp, but been a while.)
- jeffbee 5y ago
  ITA should instead be the poster child of clueless computer science stunts that actually are not that helpful. The fact that ITA can find and suggest that you could do this trip at a higher price but with a 24-hour layover in Charlotte, or with a 48-hour layover in Charlotte, or with a 96-hour layover in Charlotte, ... Someone with good taste should have stopped these crazed graph theorists before they reached the keyboard.
hnburnsy 5y ago
New ITA Matrix can be found here... https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search
- yosito 5y ago
  Well that was thouroughly disappointing.
  - fibbberMEN 5y ago
    It's a very cool list! skyscanner still seems to be better.
  - ntumlin 5y ago
    As a 20%er who worked on this it’s a bit discouraging to see such a shallow dismissal. A lot of people put in a lot of work as a passion project to keep matrix from just disappearing. Can’t win em all I guess.
    - hnburnsy 5y ago
      I think he thought it was a different Matrix as the initial title of this HN article was not precise (my bad!). As a frequent traveler thank you so much to all for the work on this.
  - dang 5y ago
    "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mrtnmcc 5y ago
  I always loved the creative solutions ITA could find, like transferring to a ferry to shuttle to another airport. To the cost sensitive adventurers, ITA was invaluable. The reboot is much snappier than the old ITA, and it now supports mobile properly! Looking forward to using. Glad Google engineers are applying their decades of experience honing Traveling Salesman type interview questions to the real life problem.
aneutron 5y ago
It's far from mobile compatible. But I'll try it once I'm on desktop.
darthrupert 5y ago
Was this that semifamous Google common lisp project?
- caslon 5y ago
  ITA Common Lisp project, but yeah. Google let it rapidly deteriorate after they purchased it.
  - auvi 5y ago
    For a while ITA was (probably is) a showcase of Common Lisp in production. But I think these days Grammarly is the one.
    - danielam 5y ago
      The choice of Common Lisp is less flattering than one might hope because it was largely the result of familiarity (Carl de Marcken's doctoral thesis was in computational linguistics and he was most comfortable using Lisp). When I asked him (c. 2007) whether he would have chosen Common Lisp again, he said that he wouldn't have and that he would have chosen Java instead. I don't recall any mention of technical reasons during that exchange (maybe static analysis?), but I do vaguely recall hiring considerations. (Also, while much of the "business logic" was written in Lisp, a good chunk of low-level stuff was written in C++.)
  - e40 5y ago
    > Google let it rapidly deteriorate after they purchased it. Is that true? They have a team of people working on SBCL and at ELS a few years after the purchase by Google they were talking about SBCL work to support the app.
savant_penguin 5y ago
Thought it meant the browser addon
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  I thought it was the protocol.
  - sigg3 5y ago
    The new Wave?
    - robobro 5y ago
      How is Matrix[0] like Apache Wave? [0] - http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/
- TowerTall 5y ago
  I thought it was the movie
- andreyf 5y ago
  Too good to be true!
caymanjim 5y ago
Awesome. I hope this sticks around for a while. Matrix has long been the best way to find flexible date, multi-leg, and multi-carrier trips.
unityByFreedom 5y ago
What is the history of ITA Matrix? I thought it was bought by Kayak.com. Was that just a license to some data or something?
- discordance 5y ago
  Google bought ITA Software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Kayak licensed/used QPX from ITA back when they were an independent company. Google acquired ITA and as part of the regulatory approval had to operate the APIs for at least the next few years. Kayak continued with QPX, but slowly shifted over to using Amadeus whenever they could. I imagine they've completely switched by now, given how bad the Google <-> kayak relationship is.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    >how bad the Google <-> kayak relationship is How come? Is it related to SEO?
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      ITA and kayak were organizationally close in a lot of ways. Kayak brought lots of useful data relationships to the table and ITA brought their technological wizardry. Google was a direct (and hostile) competitor to kayak, who led the anti-trust charge to stop the acquisition. The post-acquisition hostility is just the standard SV playbook stuff like prioritizing Google products in search results and offering amazing incentives to build market share. I have no particular insight here beyond a general interest in the industry though.
  - gertrunde 5y ago
    That's slightly frustrating to hear that Kayak are getting messed about by Google, as Kayak is about the only flight search tool that I've used that suits the airport situation in the UK. (e.g. 4-5 international airports reachable within 1 hour drive, another 2-3 reachable within 2 hours drive, flexibility to search across all of them). The other flight search tools that I've used might, at most, allow one alternative airport.
esprehn 5y ago
The deprecated frontend stack they reference would seem to be GWT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit So they're rebuilding the app in TypeScript with Angular instead of with Java+GWT.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Unfortunately, the current Matrix website implementation relies on an internally deprecated web platform slated for retirement. GWT, as you suggest, is definitely a dinosaur. > rewrite Matrix using newer web technologies like Angular, How long until Angular goes the way of GWT, though? It's not exactly a beloved technology. Not quite the same level of pain as GWT, but Angular codebases aren't something I'd like to maintain either.
  - amzn-throw 5y ago
    In 2014 most of the AWS console was written in GWT, and I worked on one of the services. Honestly? I kind of loved it. As a backend Java dev, it made a lot of sense to me, and I almost never had to touch any Javascript. Every service team at that time chose their own tech stack, and so sometimes I would hunt for ideas of how to implement something in other team's codebases, so I got to see the different tech stacks. For a brief moment Angular was really popular, and then fizzled out just as fast. For me, it was the worst of all the options by far.
    - smallerfish 5y ago
      Kotlinjs is a real successor to gwt - it even has mostly working ide debugging. Use kvision if you're going to experiment with it.
  - jvolkman 5y ago
    The entire GCP console is written in Angular, so it's probably got a bit of staying power.
    - 5y ago
deanCommie 5y ago
Something I never understood about Google's 20% time concept...do people at Google not have deadlnes? Like it's just assumed that every project estimate will be added 20% to account for 20% time? Like it's great when you're a market gorilla dominating the competition in search, but how does it work when you're #3 in the cloud and trying desperately to compete with Azure and AWS from behind. Do those people get 20% time too? Seems like a recipe for always staying #3...
- saalweachter 5y ago
  You can also think of a 20% project as being the last item in your work queue. When your "real job" is too busy, gets dropped. When you are ahead of schedule, it gets pulled out to keep you from idling. It doesn't have to be literally 20% of your time every day, week or quarter, although some people structure it that way in practice.
- gusmd 5y ago
  Maybe they are assuming that their engineers can output 25% more than Azure's and AWS'? :)
  - wmf 5y ago
    20% of a 10X engineer is two whole normal engineers!
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    Even if they're right, that means that they'd only be catching up at 5% faster than them, rather than 25...
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Why? That just means you need ~20% more people - a bit more because people don't scale like that, but Google has to scale regardless so it's not much difference. And this is an org that allegedly creates projects that will never go anywhere just to keep talent in house and busy, so I'd say they certainly can afford 20% overhead.
tata71 5y ago
So not the federated/decentralized comms protocol, then. Shucks.
- lovelearning 5y ago
  I had the opposite reaction. The idea of Google employees rewriting a decentralized comms system scared me. Relieved to find out this is some other Matrix.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yes same here.. No good could come of that. Perhaps at the start they'll contribute some valuable code, but then they will gain influence and steer the project away from this pesky decentralisation. Though I doubt it's on Google's radar so far as a serious competitor.
- wmf 5y ago
  There's already Conduit.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Ooof I was worried for a moment that this was about the Matrix chat network. I definitely don't want google messing around with that. It should stay unbiased and decentralised.
- turminal 5y ago
  The matrix chat software desperately needs an alternative implementation, I don't think it matters too much who will do it first.
  - IceWreck 5y ago
    There is the main python implementation Synapse, there are two Go implementations (Dendrite and the other chinese finance chat implementation) , one very active and one nearly dead Rust implementation, a half baked c++ implementation and some others.
    - feanaro 5y ago
      Why do you think Conduit is nearly dead? Also, what's the other Chinese implementation you're talking about?
      - seba_dos1 5y ago
        Why do you think Conduit was the "nearly dead" one and not the "very active" one? ;)
        broodbucket 5y ago
        On first read I just saw "...nearly dead Rust implementation" and didn't notice the previous fragment saying there was another very active one. Just a reading comprehension fail but maybe the sentence structure tripped up others like it did to me.
      - IceWreck 5y ago
        Like the other comment pointed out, Conduit is the "very active" implementation. https://github.com/finogeeks/Ligase https://github.com/finogeeks/Ligase This is the Chinese implementation. From the README and website it seems its being heavily used in production but the website is Chinese so I dont know for sure.
andrethegiant 5y ago
> using newer web technologies like Angular surprised that they're only replacing the frontend, and with a framework that many wouldn't consider new
dainiusse 5y ago
IMO one thing they failed (and looking over this thread looks so) is that it is not immediately clear what that "Matrix" is here.
- synthc 5y ago
  Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.
  - OAlexander 5y ago
    You have to see it for yourself?
- trollied 5y ago
  It's right there in the article! https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?
- tallanvor 5y ago
  How did they fail? They were posting to the flyertalk forums, a site where Matrix is still understood to be the Matrix search engine provided by ITA - a company Google purchased years ago. It's fine if you don't have the same expectation when referring to Matrix here on HN, but you can't expect them to cater to your understanding on every site.
baby 5y ago
Ahh, so not the chat protocol
- robobro 5y ago
  I was misled too, baby.
- walls 5y ago
  This is about something people will actually use.
travisgriggs 5y ago
Does this statement “dedicated Google “20% time” volunteers” strike anyone as a bit “army intelligence” like? Maybe I don’t understand, these are Google employees, right? Why are they volunteers too? Google gives employees a day long sabbatical once a week, thus 20%. Aren’t they paid to work then? What’s so dedicated about their offsets? Wouldn’t it be better to say something like “A subset of Google employees chose to use their weekly sabbatical time to retire technical debt for Matrix”?
- onion2k 5y ago
  What other companies never seem to understand about "Google's 20% time" is that, allegedly, as I don't work there, it wasn't really 8 hours out of your contracted 40 hours, but more like 16 hours out of the 80 hours you chose to work this week for most Googlers. People working on things in 20% time are volunteers in the sense that they're doing extra work voluntarily, rather than going home. It's not like they're doing this stuff during "work hours."
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Hence the way I've heard it referred to as "120% time."
  - skybrian 5y ago
    It’s hard to say for such a large company with people in so many countries, but I doubt all that many Googlers work much more than full time. Many have families.
  - ivalm 5y ago
    No, Googlers I know def don’t work 80 hours…
    - onion2k 5y ago
      I've only heard about it from ex-Googlers so perhaps it's different now. 20% time was introduced a long time ago (before Google went public?) and 80 hour weeks were a lot more common back then...
shmerl 5y ago
This is confusing since I first thought it refers to the Matrix protocol.
nanna 5y ago
Matrix Airfare Search. Title of thread should clarify.
- someblueman 5y ago
  It should not. ITA Matrix is a well-known tool in the industry, and anyone even closely associated with the airline industry is aware of it.
chriswwweb 5y ago
I like it, worked well for the few tests I did, however the main form needs some small UX improvements, I chose a start airport and destination airport but then the search button was disabled, leaving me clueless about what field was not filled out correctly, I quickly noticed it must be the date field, but still to me disabling a submit button of a form seems like a bad idea because if disable it you also remove the display of potential error messages related to the form failing validation, which to me is a UX no go (take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm not a UX guy). The second thing that bothers me is that none of the form fields actually tells you which ones are mandatory and which ones are not
- moontear 5y ago
  Take that to the Feedback form, I'm sure the product team would appreciate such detailed feedback.
  - chriswwweb 5y ago
    good idea, thx, done
tomhoward 5y ago
For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers, points hackers, etc. It was built by ITA Software [1][2] in the early-mid 2000s (the earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 [3]) to test and showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. I once heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to justify making it a mainstream interface. Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010, was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to find flights when travelling around the world for college debating competitions. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down last year. It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves). In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software [2] https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-travel-company-everyone-uses-and-no-one-knows-reinvents-airline-reservations-again/ https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-trave... [3] https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-seattle-amsterdam-paris-484637/ https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-sea...
- mathewsanders 5y ago
  Between ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. This was still pretty much the dawn of online ticket sales, and people were still either calling an airline or going though a travel agent. I remember our group for ‘online sales’ was a team of literally ten people and technology was mostly outsourced to vendors so we were initially more of a marketing group. I remember the year we joined we crossed $1M revenue for online ticket sales and that was actually a surprise to a lot of people in the company. This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it. Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver. Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!
ricardobayes 5y ago
This is probably a hard challenge, because I assume the data is semi-scraped.
- tincholio 5y ago
  Why? Google owns ITA...
- itamarst 5y ago
  I used to work at ITA, and no, it's not semi-scraped, it's doing same calculations airline reservation system does to approve a fare.
- danielam 5y ago
  "The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and seat availability, provided electronically over private networks by the 800 or so airlines of the world. The data is not directly available to the general public and access often must be negotiated with individual airlines. Flight data is updated daily or occasionally more frequently in the case of unexpected cancellations. Prices are updated about ten times a day, and seat availability continuously. A large portion of the flight, price and seat availability data, called published data, is used by all the major search engines, but a significant amount of private data is restricted." [0] [0] http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img1.html http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
dakial1 5y ago
In my early years I worked at a airline commerce redesign with people from Amadeus (migrating from their e-retail to WDS, great team). It was an awesome experience, as the channel had still a low penetration (2% of sales) on the airline overall sales and the team left lot of the product ownership on my hands (an external consultant). I remember playing a lot with the search features including allowing pax to: - Search for a date and no destination to get the best deals for that range - Search for a destination but no date and get a month matrix with the best rates to travel to that destination. Of course they were barely used by paxs, but I liked very much to leave these kind of easter eggs for more advanced users.
iakh 5y ago
Wanted to self plug a community project I maintain that continues to enhance ITA Matrix, Powertools[1] and see if anybody wanted to help port it over to this new front end. PRs accepted! 1. https://github.com/adamhwang/ita-matrix-powertools https://github.com/adamhwang/ita-matrix-powertools
- qeternity 5y ago
  Whoa - crazy seeing you here. Hello from an old member of our old little Slack group. <end of line> @iakh is a legend!
  - iakh 5y ago
    Funny when worlds collide! Glad to hear from you again
Arubis 5y ago
Any chance they’re doing the backend in a lisp this time around?
- e40 5y ago
  I can't tell if it is a rewrite of the frontend or both. Seems more like it might just be frontend work?
vegetish 5y ago
You still can't do a search with origin from multiple countries, which annoys me. If I want to find the cheapest ticket for a cross-atlantic trip, it would be very helpful to have such a feature.
- qeternity 5y ago
  You used to be able to. It was brilliant, you could do a quick relocation flight, even make it a nice little first stop, and then get a nice long haul somewhere else. Ah the good old days.
- glup 5y ago
  Kiwi used to have this in their map view -- you could select a very large circular region regardless of country as the origin -- but it seems like they got rid of it. This was by far the most useful tool to identify cheap segments and cut down the space of options.
jonp888 5y ago
It looks powerful, however since it doesn't seem to include any results for Ryanair or Easyjet it's pretty much useless for short/medium haul trips in Europe. I use azair.com for that, although it seems to be quite technologically primitive behind the scenes(complex searches take a long time).
- xcooper 5y ago
  It's not primitive, believe me... It might rather be because no one else makes such complex searches possible (perhaps with the exception of ITA). Take an example: From anywhere in Germany to anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, next summer, max. 1 connection, for 5-8 days, return to same airport: https://azair.me/!4gDR https://azair.me/!4gDR ... is generated in 2.3 sec. That's not long Or what did you mean by complex searches?
- Calchas_ 5y ago
  Yes, Ryanair and EasyJet do not participate in global reservation systems, so ITA doesn’t have access to them.
  - ragall 5y ago
    The QPX infra can source data from the airlines themselves so that's not the issue. Ryanair and Easyjet don't want to give their data to Google.
- jhncls 5y ago
  With Trabber you can choose "nearby" airports for either departure and/or destination airport. It includes Ryanair, Easyjet and many smaller European airlines. [0]: https://www.trabber.es/en https://www.trabber.es/en
thesausageking 5y ago
ITA Matrix is still my go-to for booking flights: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ Playing with this version, it's a little easier to use, but I don't see any functionality not in the regular version. Still, if it means Google is investing in Matrix, that's a good thing. I always worry at some point it will be killed.
- notyourwork 5y ago
  > https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ Error: Service Unavailable for me.
  - thesausageking 5y ago
    Try it again; it loads for me. I'm guessing it got hugged to death by everyone checking it out.
- the_pwner224 5y ago
  The speed and usability of this website is so refreshing compared to all the other flight search sites. All the input boxes are normal and shown on screen at once, the calendar and airport selection autocompleter dropdowns work instantly with zero lag or animations, and then it shows the results after 2 seconds of processing time. The new design in the OP is still decent compared to the alternative websites, but slower and harder to use compared to this original design (to me, who had never heard of Matrix before). It's a shame that this is going to be gone soon.
- traek 5y ago
  > Still, if it means Google is investing in Matrix, that's a good thing. I always worry at some point it will be killed. This isn't Google investing in Matrix, this is a group of people who work at Google using their spare time to rewrite the product so it doesn't get taken offline. If anything, the lack of a dedicated team or resources is a strong indicator that Matrix will be on the chopping block at some point in the future.
  - 5y ago
qeternity 5y ago
As someone who has done some of the most extreme/risky forms of travel hacking (serious FD's with 1X + sX for those familiar with lingo), Matrix lost a huge amount of its value when it disallowed searches that start from multiple countries. It's tedious to have to break up a search. Of course, this is not necessarily what they intended it for, so I can't really complain too much. And covid uncertainty these days has made proper flight hacking a bit of a pastime.
- vianneychevalie 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on the lingo, or point in a direction for learning?
  - splonk 5y ago
    Normally I'd try Flyertalk for finding out what abbreviations mean, but this article probably explains well enough what OP is talking about. https://princeoftravel.com/blog/airline-secrets-what-is-fuel-dumping/ https://princeoftravel.com/blog/airline-secrets-what-is-fuel...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- supernova87a 5y ago
  Thanks for that example! Can I ask where is good to trade info and stories about this stuff? I have been on FT for a long time, but never came across this level of fare exploration. The extent of my enthusiasm is years ago jumping on things like the Icelandair or BA WT fare mistakes. Never actually searching / generating fare loopholes. Maybe I'm reading the wrong forums. Even just to hear about it interests me (to know what I'm missing out on)...
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Unfortunately people guard this stuff closely for fear of airlines catching on, or at least they used to. I haven’t looked at it seriously in a couple of years but airlines were making a real effort to tighten up fare rules to cut down on this. Even when I was doing it a lot, all of the easy stuff was already mostly fixed, save for the odd mistake here or there. I for instance would never post the hacks I’ve discovered, and would only share them with a select few. It’s self preservation, but once they’re known, travel bloggers spread them and every Karen ends up doing it.
fulafel 5y ago
I wonder what's the co2 impact of contributing to a thing like this. You're helping sell more flights in the end.
m-s 5y ago
If you search for flights to “QPX”, you get a flappy bird clone
- flipperto 5y ago
  There's other nice easter egg in the url for that query https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/↑↑↓↓←→←→BA https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/↑↑↓↓←→←→BA
supahfly_remix 5y ago
Is there anything similar for hotels?
rurban 5y ago
Results not viewable in Android Firefox. Cut off at the left side. Such is modern angular
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
I'm honestly surprised 20% time is still a thing at Google. I would say around 8 years ago when I spoke to a Google employee they were saying it was there but basically the 20% time went towards things that were basically just an offshoot of that department anyway. And then I haven't heard of the 20% time at all in the last..maybe 5 years, although I don't really know anyone who works at Google anymore. It kind of reminded me of the vibe with postdoc students having to stick within their advisor's field versus really being able to do projects for themselves.
deeblering4 5y ago
> Unfortunately, the current Matrix website implementation relies on an internally deprecated web platform slated for retirement. Ahh the most Google reason ever

407 points by hnburnsy 5y ago

I want to search for a flight with as many multi-day stops as possible, while keeping the price low. Whenever there is a stopover, I'd like it to be 24 hours plus, so I can explore that city. Ie. give me the most circuitous route, so I can explore the world. Yet nobody seems to have done this.

evacchi 5y ago
I don't know how good is but you may want to look at airwander.com
krrrh 5y ago
You can do this sort of thing in ITA Matrix, it still takes a lot of work to craft the itinerary and learn the syntax, but I have used it to do exactly what you suggest, and found cheap 36 hour bonus stayovers.

syngrog66 5y ago

ITA for a long time was the "poster boy" exemplar case whenever anyone asked whether Lisp was being used for anything big in the real world. I worked for Orbitz during the era when ITA was still independent, and we used their flight search software in our backend. ("QPX" might have been its product name, that used Lisp, but been a while.)

jeffbee 5y ago
ITA should instead be the poster child of clueless computer science stunts that actually are not that helpful. The fact that ITA can find and suggest that you could do this trip at a higher price but with a 24-hour layover in Charlotte, or with a 48-hour layover in Charlotte, or with a 96-hour layover in Charlotte, ... Someone with good taste should have stopped these crazed graph theorists before they reached the keyboard.

hnburnsy 5y ago

New ITA Matrix can be found here... https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search

yosito 5y ago
Well that was thouroughly disappointing.
- fibbberMEN 5y ago
  It's a very cool list! skyscanner still seems to be better.
- ntumlin 5y ago
  As a 20%er who worked on this it’s a bit discouraging to see such a shallow dismissal. A lot of people put in a lot of work as a passion project to keep matrix from just disappearing. Can’t win em all I guess.
  - hnburnsy 5y ago
    I think he thought it was a different Matrix as the initial title of this HN article was not precise (my bad!). As a frequent traveler thank you so much to all for the work on this.
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mrtnmcc 5y ago
I always loved the creative solutions ITA could find, like transferring to a ferry to shuttle to another airport. To the cost sensitive adventurers, ITA was invaluable. The reboot is much snappier than the old ITA, and it now supports mobile properly! Looking forward to using. Glad Google engineers are applying their decades of experience honing Traveling Salesman type interview questions to the real life problem.

aneutron 5y ago

It's far from mobile compatible. But I'll try it once I'm on desktop.

darthrupert 5y ago

Was this that semifamous Google common lisp project?

caslon 5y ago
ITA Common Lisp project, but yeah. Google let it rapidly deteriorate after they purchased it.
- auvi 5y ago
  For a while ITA was (probably is) a showcase of Common Lisp in production. But I think these days Grammarly is the one.
  - danielam 5y ago
    The choice of Common Lisp is less flattering than one might hope because it was largely the result of familiarity (Carl de Marcken's doctoral thesis was in computational linguistics and he was most comfortable using Lisp). When I asked him (c. 2007) whether he would have chosen Common Lisp again, he said that he wouldn't have and that he would have chosen Java instead. I don't recall any mention of technical reasons during that exchange (maybe static analysis?), but I do vaguely recall hiring considerations. (Also, while much of the "business logic" was written in Lisp, a good chunk of low-level stuff was written in C++.)
- e40 5y ago
  > Google let it rapidly deteriorate after they purchased it. Is that true? They have a team of people working on SBCL and at ELS a few years after the purchase by Google they were talking about SBCL work to support the app.

savant_penguin 5y ago

Thought it meant the browser addon

heavyset_go 5y ago
I thought it was the protocol.
- sigg3 5y ago
  The new Wave?
  - robobro 5y ago
    How is Matrix[0] like Apache Wave? [0] - http://matrix.org/ http://matrix.org/
TowerTall 5y ago
I thought it was the movie
andreyf 5y ago
Too good to be true!

caymanjim 5y ago

Awesome. I hope this sticks around for a while. Matrix has long been the best way to find flexible date, multi-leg, and multi-carrier trips.

unityByFreedom 5y ago

What is the history of ITA Matrix? I thought it was bought by Kayak.com. Was that just a license to some data or something?

discordance 5y ago
Google bought ITA Software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
AlotOfReading 5y ago
Kayak licensed/used QPX from ITA back when they were an independent company. Google acquired ITA and as part of the regulatory approval had to operate the APIs for at least the next few years. Kayak continued with QPX, but slowly shifted over to using Amadeus whenever they could. I imagine they've completely switched by now, given how bad the Google <-> kayak relationship is.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  >how bad the Google <-> kayak relationship is How come? Is it related to SEO?
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    ITA and kayak were organizationally close in a lot of ways. Kayak brought lots of useful data relationships to the table and ITA brought their technological wizardry. Google was a direct (and hostile) competitor to kayak, who led the anti-trust charge to stop the acquisition. The post-acquisition hostility is just the standard SV playbook stuff like prioritizing Google products in search results and offering amazing incentives to build market share. I have no particular insight here beyond a general interest in the industry though.
- gertrunde 5y ago
  That's slightly frustrating to hear that Kayak are getting messed about by Google, as Kayak is about the only flight search tool that I've used that suits the airport situation in the UK. (e.g. 4-5 international airports reachable within 1 hour drive, another 2-3 reachable within 2 hours drive, flexibility to search across all of them). The other flight search tools that I've used might, at most, allow one alternative airport.

esprehn 5y ago

The deprecated frontend stack they reference would seem to be GWT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit So they're rebuilding the app in TypeScript with Angular instead of with Java+GWT.

echelon 5y ago
> Unfortunately, the current Matrix website implementation relies on an internally deprecated web platform slated for retirement. GWT, as you suggest, is definitely a dinosaur. > rewrite Matrix using newer web technologies like Angular, How long until Angular goes the way of GWT, though? It's not exactly a beloved technology. Not quite the same level of pain as GWT, but Angular codebases aren't something I'd like to maintain either.
- amzn-throw 5y ago
  In 2014 most of the AWS console was written in GWT, and I worked on one of the services. Honestly? I kind of loved it. As a backend Java dev, it made a lot of sense to me, and I almost never had to touch any Javascript. Every service team at that time chose their own tech stack, and so sometimes I would hunt for ideas of how to implement something in other team's codebases, so I got to see the different tech stacks. For a brief moment Angular was really popular, and then fizzled out just as fast. For me, it was the worst of all the options by far.
  - smallerfish 5y ago
    Kotlinjs is a real successor to gwt - it even has mostly working ide debugging. Use kvision if you're going to experiment with it.
- jvolkman 5y ago
  The entire GCP console is written in Angular, so it's probably got a bit of staying power.
  - 5y ago

deanCommie 5y ago

Something I never understood about Google's 20% time concept...do people at Google not have deadlnes? Like it's just assumed that every project estimate will be added 20% to account for 20% time? Like it's great when you're a market gorilla dominating the competition in search, but how does it work when you're #3 in the cloud and trying desperately to compete with Azure and AWS from behind. Do those people get 20% time too? Seems like a recipe for always staying #3...

saalweachter 5y ago
You can also think of a 20% project as being the last item in your work queue. When your "real job" is too busy, gets dropped. When you are ahead of schedule, it gets pulled out to keep you from idling. It doesn't have to be literally 20% of your time every day, week or quarter, although some people structure it that way in practice.
gusmd 5y ago
Maybe they are assuming that their engineers can output 25% more than Azure's and AWS'? :)
- wmf 5y ago
  20% of a 10X engineer is two whole normal engineers!
- deanCommie 5y ago
  Even if they're right, that means that they'd only be catching up at 5% faster than them, rather than 25...
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Why? That just means you need ~20% more people - a bit more because people don't scale like that, but Google has to scale regardless so it's not much difference. And this is an org that allegedly creates projects that will never go anywhere just to keep talent in house and busy, so I'd say they certainly can afford 20% overhead.

tata71 5y ago

So not the federated/decentralized comms protocol, then. Shucks.

lovelearning 5y ago
I had the opposite reaction. The idea of Google employees rewriting a decentralized comms system scared me. Relieved to find out this is some other Matrix.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yes same here.. No good could come of that. Perhaps at the start they'll contribute some valuable code, but then they will gain influence and steer the project away from this pesky decentralisation. Though I doubt it's on Google's radar so far as a serious competitor.
wmf 5y ago
There's already Conduit.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Ooof I was worried for a moment that this was about the Matrix chat network. I definitely don't want google messing around with that. It should stay unbiased and decentralised.

turminal 5y ago
The matrix chat software desperately needs an alternative implementation, I don't think it matters too much who will do it first.
- IceWreck 5y ago
  There is the main python implementation Synapse, there are two Go implementations (Dendrite and the other chinese finance chat implementation) , one very active and one nearly dead Rust implementation, a half baked c++ implementation and some others.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    Why do you think Conduit is nearly dead? Also, what's the other Chinese implementation you're talking about?
    - seba_dos1 5y ago
      Why do you think Conduit was the "nearly dead" one and not the "very active" one? ;)
      - broodbucket 5y ago
        On first read I just saw "...nearly dead Rust implementation" and didn't notice the previous fragment saying there was another very active one. Just a reading comprehension fail but maybe the sentence structure tripped up others like it did to me.
    - IceWreck 5y ago
      Like the other comment pointed out, Conduit is the "very active" implementation. https://github.com/finogeeks/Ligase https://github.com/finogeeks/Ligase This is the Chinese implementation. From the README and website it seems its being heavily used in production but the website is Chinese so I dont know for sure.

andrethegiant 5y ago

> using newer web technologies like Angular surprised that they're only replacing the frontend, and with a framework that many wouldn't consider new

dainiusse 5y ago

IMO one thing they failed (and looking over this thread looks so) is that it is not immediately clear what that "Matrix" is here.

synthc 5y ago
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.
- OAlexander 5y ago
  You have to see it for yourself?
trollied 5y ago
It's right there in the article! https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/search
chrisco255 5y ago
Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?
tallanvor 5y ago
How did they fail? They were posting to the flyertalk forums, a site where Matrix is still understood to be the Matrix search engine provided by ITA - a company Google purchased years ago. It's fine if you don't have the same expectation when referring to Matrix here on HN, but you can't expect them to cater to your understanding on every site.

baby 5y ago

Ahh, so not the chat protocol

robobro 5y ago
I was misled too, baby.
walls 5y ago
This is about something people will actually use.

travisgriggs 5y ago

Does this statement “dedicated Google “20% time” volunteers” strike anyone as a bit “army intelligence” like? Maybe I don’t understand, these are Google employees, right? Why are they volunteers too? Google gives employees a day long sabbatical once a week, thus 20%. Aren’t they paid to work then? What’s so dedicated about their offsets? Wouldn’t it be better to say something like “A subset of Google employees chose to use their weekly sabbatical time to retire technical debt for Matrix”?

onion2k 5y ago
What other companies never seem to understand about "Google's 20% time" is that, allegedly, as I don't work there, it wasn't really 8 hours out of your contracted 40 hours, but more like 16 hours out of the 80 hours you chose to work this week for most Googlers. People working on things in 20% time are volunteers in the sense that they're doing extra work voluntarily, rather than going home. It's not like they're doing this stuff during "work hours."
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Hence the way I've heard it referred to as "120% time."
- skybrian 5y ago
  It’s hard to say for such a large company with people in so many countries, but I doubt all that many Googlers work much more than full time. Many have families.
- ivalm 5y ago
  No, Googlers I know def don’t work 80 hours…
  - onion2k 5y ago
    I've only heard about it from ex-Googlers so perhaps it's different now. 20% time was introduced a long time ago (before Google went public?) and 80 hour weeks were a lot more common back then...

shmerl 5y ago

This is confusing since I first thought it refers to the Matrix protocol.

nanna 5y ago

Matrix Airfare Search. Title of thread should clarify.

someblueman 5y ago
It should not. ITA Matrix is a well-known tool in the industry, and anyone even closely associated with the airline industry is aware of it.

chriswwweb 5y ago

I like it, worked well for the few tests I did, however the main form needs some small UX improvements, I chose a start airport and destination airport but then the search button was disabled, leaving me clueless about what field was not filled out correctly, I quickly noticed it must be the date field, but still to me disabling a submit button of a form seems like a bad idea because if disable it you also remove the display of potential error messages related to the form failing validation, which to me is a UX no go (take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm not a UX guy). The second thing that bothers me is that none of the form fields actually tells you which ones are mandatory and which ones are not

moontear 5y ago
Take that to the Feedback form, I'm sure the product team would appreciate such detailed feedback.
- chriswwweb 5y ago
  good idea, thx, done

tomhoward 5y ago

For those unfamiliar with ITA Matrix, it was for a long time the go-to flight search tool for the most dedicated flight hackers, points hackers, etc. It was built by ITA Software [1][2] in the early-mid 2000s (the earliest mention I can find of it is in 2004 [3]) to test and showcase the capabilities of their flight search platform. I once heard that ITA and other consumer-facing flight search companies had tested that kind of UI with ordinary users, but found that not enough people understood or liked it enough for them to justify making it a mainstream interface. Hipmunk, a YC-backed flight search site that launched in 2010, was heavily influenced by the ITA Matrix UI, after co-founder Adam Goldstein had found Matrix to be the best way for him to find flights when travelling around the world for college debating competitions. And while Hipmunk did a good job of being more consumer-friendly and popular than Matrix had been, sadly they didn't gain enough traction to make it as a standalone company, and after being acquired by SAP/Concur, it was shut down last year. It's an interesting, and perhaps depressing case of a product design concept being far superior to what's available in the mainstream for a certain class of user, but cannot gain enough mainstream acceptance to be a viable business or even a well-supported service for those who love it. And far more than most other product categories, flight search has huge infrastructure costs, so it's very difficult to economically sustain niche products (from grim personal experience of being part of a team trying to build a novel flight search product ourselves). In this case it's just lucky that Google owns the infrastructure and has enough enthusiasm internally to keep it going to some extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software [2] https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-travel-company-everyone-uses-and-no-one-knows-reinvents-airline-reservations-again/ https://xconomy.com/boston/2008/12/17/ita-software-the-trave... [3] https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-seattle-amsterdam-paris-484637/ https://www.fodors.com/community/europe/customs-question-sea...

mathewsanders 5y ago
Between ~2000-2010 I worked for an international airline and I can share that we were testing a lot more innovative search interfaces for consumers. This was still pretty much the dawn of online ticket sales, and people were still either calling an airline or going though a travel agent. I remember our group for ‘online sales’ was a team of literally ten people and technology was mostly outsourced to vendors so we were initially more of a marketing group. I remember the year we joined we crossed $1M revenue for online ticket sales and that was actually a surprise to a lot of people in the company. This was my first real job after graduating, and one of my roles was industry research and putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting technology to keep an eye on and when ITA released Matrix we loved it. Long story short, we wanted to do a lot of things like this, but our airline (and most others) were not developing our own tech and instead using some technology from the major GDS companies (Amadeus, SABRE, Galileo). One project I was on was working to try and implement just a basic fuzzy date search (eg +/- 3 days of your preferred date) and our GDS was quoting us something like $3M and 12months to deliver. Luckily we had an exec who understood business, technology, and design and got resources to build out internal technology team and we started building our own technology that freed us from some of the constraints of GDS to great success!

ricardobayes 5y ago

This is probably a hard challenge, because I assume the data is semi-scraped.

tincholio 5y ago
Why? Google owns ITA...
itamarst 5y ago
I used to work at ITA, and no, it's not semi-scraped, it's doing same calculations airline reservation system does to approve a fare.
danielam 5y ago
"The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and seat availability, provided electronically over private networks by the 800 or so airlines of the world. The data is not directly available to the general public and access often must be negotiated with individual airlines. Flight data is updated daily or occasionally more frequently in the case of unexpected cancellations. Prices are updated about ten times a day, and seat availability continuously. A large portion of the flight, price and seat availability data, called published data, is used by all the major search engines, but a significant amount of private data is restricted." [0] [0] http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/img1.html http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

dakial1 5y ago

In my early years I worked at a airline commerce redesign with people from Amadeus (migrating from their e-retail to WDS, great team). It was an awesome experience, as the channel had still a low penetration (2% of sales) on the airline overall sales and the team left lot of the product ownership on my hands (an external consultant). I remember playing a lot with the search features including allowing pax to: - Search for a date and no destination to get the best deals for that range - Search for a destination but no date and get a month matrix with the best rates to travel to that destination. Of course they were barely used by paxs, but I liked very much to leave these kind of easter eggs for more advanced users.

iakh 5y ago

Wanted to self plug a community project I maintain that continues to enhance ITA Matrix, Powertools[1] and see if anybody wanted to help port it over to this new front end. PRs accepted! 1. https://github.com/adamhwang/ita-matrix-powertools https://github.com/adamhwang/ita-matrix-powertools

qeternity 5y ago
Whoa - crazy seeing you here. Hello from an old member of our old little Slack group. <end of line> @iakh is a legend!
- iakh 5y ago
  Funny when worlds collide! Glad to hear from you again

Arubis 5y ago

Any chance they’re doing the backend in a lisp this time around?

e40 5y ago
I can't tell if it is a rewrite of the frontend or both. Seems more like it might just be frontend work?

vegetish 5y ago

You still can't do a search with origin from multiple countries, which annoys me. If I want to find the cheapest ticket for a cross-atlantic trip, it would be very helpful to have such a feature.

qeternity 5y ago
You used to be able to. It was brilliant, you could do a quick relocation flight, even make it a nice little first stop, and then get a nice long haul somewhere else. Ah the good old days.
glup 5y ago
Kiwi used to have this in their map view -- you could select a very large circular region regardless of country as the origin -- but it seems like they got rid of it. This was by far the most useful tool to identify cheap segments and cut down the space of options.

jonp888 5y ago

It looks powerful, however since it doesn't seem to include any results for Ryanair or Easyjet it's pretty much useless for short/medium haul trips in Europe. I use azair.com for that, although it seems to be quite technologically primitive behind the scenes(complex searches take a long time).

xcooper 5y ago
It's not primitive, believe me... It might rather be because no one else makes such complex searches possible (perhaps with the exception of ITA). Take an example: From anywhere in Germany to anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, next summer, max. 1 connection, for 5-8 days, return to same airport: https://azair.me/!4gDR https://azair.me/!4gDR ... is generated in 2.3 sec. That's not long Or what did you mean by complex searches?
Calchas_ 5y ago
Yes, Ryanair and EasyJet do not participate in global reservation systems, so ITA doesn’t have access to them.
- ragall 5y ago
  The QPX infra can source data from the airlines themselves so that's not the issue. Ryanair and Easyjet don't want to give their data to Google.
jhncls 5y ago
With Trabber you can choose "nearby" airports for either departure and/or destination airport. It includes Ryanair, Easyjet and many smaller European airlines. [0]: https://www.trabber.es/en https://www.trabber.es/en

thesausageking 5y ago

ITA Matrix is still my go-to for booking flights: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ Playing with this version, it's a little easier to use, but I don't see any functionality not in the regular version. Still, if it means Google is investing in Matrix, that's a good thing. I always worry at some point it will be killed.

notyourwork 5y ago
> https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ Error: Service Unavailable for me.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  Try it again; it loads for me. I'm guessing it got hugged to death by everyone checking it out.
the_pwner224 5y ago
The speed and usability of this website is so refreshing compared to all the other flight search sites. All the input boxes are normal and shown on screen at once, the calendar and airport selection autocompleter dropdowns work instantly with zero lag or animations, and then it shows the results after 2 seconds of processing time. The new design in the OP is still decent compared to the alternative websites, but slower and harder to use compared to this original design (to me, who had never heard of Matrix before). It's a shame that this is going to be gone soon.
traek 5y ago
> Still, if it means Google is investing in Matrix, that's a good thing. I always worry at some point it will be killed. This isn't Google investing in Matrix, this is a group of people who work at Google using their spare time to rewrite the product so it doesn't get taken offline. If anything, the lack of a dedicated team or resources is a strong indicator that Matrix will be on the chopping block at some point in the future.
- 5y ago

qeternity 5y ago

As someone who has done some of the most extreme/risky forms of travel hacking (serious FD's with 1X + sX for those familiar with lingo), Matrix lost a huge amount of its value when it disallowed searches that start from multiple countries. It's tedious to have to break up a search. Of course, this is not necessarily what they intended it for, so I can't really complain too much. And covid uncertainty these days has made proper flight hacking a bit of a pastime.

vianneychevalie 5y ago
Can you elaborate on the lingo, or point in a direction for learning?
- splonk 5y ago
  Normally I'd try Flyertalk for finding out what abbreviations mean, but this article probably explains well enough what OP is talking about. https://princeoftravel.com/blog/airline-secrets-what-is-fuel-dumping/ https://princeoftravel.com/blog/airline-secrets-what-is-fuel...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
supernova87a 5y ago
Thanks for that example! Can I ask where is good to trade info and stories about this stuff? I have been on FT for a long time, but never came across this level of fare exploration. The extent of my enthusiasm is years ago jumping on things like the Icelandair or BA WT fare mistakes. Never actually searching / generating fare loopholes. Maybe I'm reading the wrong forums. Even just to hear about it interests me (to know what I'm missing out on)...
- qeternity 5y ago
  Unfortunately people guard this stuff closely for fear of airlines catching on, or at least they used to. I haven’t looked at it seriously in a couple of years but airlines were making a real effort to tighten up fare rules to cut down on this. Even when I was doing it a lot, all of the easy stuff was already mostly fixed, save for the odd mistake here or there. I for instance would never post the hacks I’ve discovered, and would only share them with a select few. It’s self preservation, but once they’re known, travel bloggers spread them and every Karen ends up doing it.

fulafel 5y ago

I wonder what's the co2 impact of contributing to a thing like this. You're helping sell more flights in the end.

m-s 5y ago

If you search for flights to “QPX”, you get a flappy bird clone

flipperto 5y ago
There's other nice easter egg in the url for that query https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/↑↑↓↓←→←→BA https://partnerdash.google.com/apps/matrix/↑↑↓↓←→←→BA

supahfly_remix 5y ago

Is there anything similar for hotels?

rurban 5y ago

Results not viewable in Android Firefox. Cut off at the left side. Such is modern angular

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago

I'm honestly surprised 20% time is still a thing at Google. I would say around 8 years ago when I spoke to a Google employee they were saying it was there but basically the 20% time went towards things that were basically just an offshoot of that department anyway. And then I haven't heard of the 20% time at all in the last..maybe 5 years, although I don't really know anyone who works at Google anymore. It kind of reminded me of the vibe with postdoc students having to stick within their advisor's field versus really being able to do projects for themselves.

deeblering4 5y ago

> Unfortunately, the current Matrix website implementation relies on an internally deprecated web platform slated for retirement. Ahh the most Google reason ever