[symesc]

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?

[pinko]

It's not just about prices, it's about routings. For roughly the same price (give or take $100), I often have 50-100 options for each segment, of wildly varying convenience and robustness (in terms of flight time, layover, delay likelihood, airline, etc.). Their system does an incredibly good job laying out this info in a comprehensible form, and more importantly, providing an advanced routing language that allows me to say, for example:

MSN :: AA ORD AA X AZ

BLQ :: AZ X AA ORD AA

...which means I want an American Airlines flight from Madison, WI, connecting through O'Hare, and continuing on to Bologna, Italy, with one and only one intermediate connection, with the over-the-pond leg on AA, and the final leg on Alitalia.

It can then lay out the options for me graphically, so I can instantly see which flights have nasty layovers or bad schedules without having to parse a single text digit.

It's not just about price.

[mkramlich]

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.

[hga]

As far as I know ITA's QPX system has no inherent insurmountable bottlenecks, but I'm not sure Google's scale will make much difference anyway:

There's a C++ backend that collects and massages the various data streams and then loads the data into an in memory database. Much of that is quite parallelizable, e.g there are various data sources, the massaging probably needs only so much global state, etc.

The computational front end is an SBCL process that does its magic based on a copy of the in memory database. One process, one query at a time, that scales out very nicely.

I suspect the biggest tricks besides groking the data (hard since it's so messy and special cased) and their secret sauce that does the routing is maintaining the required availability. There I suspect ITA's service/operations culture has things it can teach the corresponding Google culture.

[mkramlich]

Kayak also runs on top of ITA

(only 90% sure, i can't find my notes to confirm right now. i had to know this a few months ago for work reasons)

[smaher]

Yes, it does. It's in the press release at: http://investor.google.com/releases/2010/0701.html

"ITA's QPX software tool for organizing flight information is used by leading airlines and travel distributors worldwide including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Bing, Continental Airlines, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and others."

[mkramlich]

cool thanks!

so like i said... gigantic move in the travel industry :)