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Have you tried out Google Flights? I've been told it's based on this same technology, and has a much better UI. And be sure to click around. It has some intere
by scotth 14y ago
Have you tried out Google Flights? I've been told it's based on this same technology, and has a much better UI.
And be sure to click around. It has some interesting tools, like prices for flights to your destination flown out of nearby airports.
- patrickod 14y agoI believe that ITA software is owned by Google. They license it to others as well.
- brianbreslin 14y agowow google flights is super fast!
- edouard1234567 14y agoMy guess is that they predict the most common searches and constantly query and cash results for these searches, something I don't think Kayak or hipmunk does. I don't think you can launch a search product on google if it takes more than .xx seconds to return the result...
- cshesse 14y agoIt could have something to do with the fact that Google owns ITA.
- edouard1234567 14y agoI think that owning ITA allows them to have more data to mine/predict and better access but it doesn't explain how fast the searches are. Most airfare searches still hit GDSs which are relatively slow to respond. The only way I can think of Google can deliver such a performance is by intelligently pre-caching airfare searches. Google?
- brianbreslin 14y agoI'm not so sure, I looked for a few random flights. However, having built my own very rudimentary internal flight search tool from the global flight list, I can tell you there are roughly 7 million flights per month, a small data set by google standards.
- edouard1234567 14y agoIt's not the size of the dataset that is relevant but more that this dataset changes in realtime : price + availability. These requests go through GDSs that are relatively slow, that's why so called real-time search engines like kayak are fairly slow. What do you exactly mean by 7M flights? Keep in mind that most search requests involve a combination of flights (leg), outbound, inbound and sometime multiple stops...
- baby 14y agonot working in Europe. God damn!