

Google to launch flight search service soon - hydrazine
http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/google-flight-search-engine/

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tectonic
I 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.

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magic_haze
Both 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.

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tectonic
Is any of that data free/cheap for experimentation?

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magic_haze
A 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.

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derrida
Wow. 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.

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make_lemonade
Hipmunk 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.

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tnorthcutt
To paraphrase Steven Tyler, they won't have to come - they're already there.

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sp332
I 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....

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ctingom
Curious to see the customer service aspect of the airline booking business.

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inportb
Ah... but would it be better than Hipmunk?

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DannoHung
Yeah, 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.

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inportb
Well, the money's in hotel reservations, so I guess it's in the pipeline.

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shii
Exactly, 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.

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jojopotato
Actually 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

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ujjvala
Google might acquire Hipmunk which already uses GWT.

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jonburs
Why do you think Hipmunk uses GWT (by which I assume you mean Google Web
Toolkit)? The source for www.hipmunk.com pulls in jquery, but doesn't have the
history iframe or <module>.nocache.js reference that one would expect to see
for a GWT application.

