
Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million - alec
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/taking-off-with-ita.html
======
Alex3917
Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most
basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50
miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during
August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive
question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time
for an answer if I potentially stand to save a couple hundred bucks.

~~~
alec
I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine.

We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't
currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head
to <http://matrix2.itasoftware.com>, put in where you are, then click "Nearby"
- the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You
can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights".

Many of our customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front
page.

~~~
solutionyogi
From the page you linked:

 _Note: Tickets cannot be purchased directly from ITA Software. If you find a
fare you like, you can give the information from this site to your travel
agent or airline when making a booking._

This is a deal breaker. I do not want to contact travel agent OR airline
customer rep for booking my tickets. I want to find the best fare, enter my
credit card and be done. Also, why should Travel Agent OR airline honor the
fare which you posted when we all know that flight ticket pricing is highly
dynamic?

~~~
giantfuzzypanda
ITA Software provides the back-end for other online travel companies. They
don't actually sell tickets, so if someone is misinformed about their site and
tries to buy a ticket they are told where to actually do so.

------
jey
Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far
better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM
Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.

~~~
hga
ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has
been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called
RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these
systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases.

Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance
Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a
outline and link to the talk see: <http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html>).

RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the
only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web
libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time,
which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC.

The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to
accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer.
In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly
suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching
would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly
is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.)

This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure
can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service
culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.

~~~
jurjenh
That, and google has an aversion to common lisp... so it would need to be a
rewrite.

EDIT: Mind you, I've only heard of the aversion to lisp, so have no data to
back my claim up. That said, it has been mentioned several times on HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023>

~~~
avar
The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that
had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No".

That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700
million whose core tech is written in Lisp.

~~~
mkramlich
I don't think they'd have an aversion to buying a piece of legacy software
written in Lisp if said software had a proven revenue stream and was part of
the core underpinning to a major category of search they want to get into
more.

However, it's reasonable for them to be averse to writing totally new projects
in Lisp, in-house, because when you're at a huge company as a general rule you
don't want dozens of different languages in use: it's inefficient and you lose
out on a lot of opportunities to leverage skills across teams and across
service layers if you do that. Lisp, from what I heard, didn't make the cut,
despite it's strengths. They still allow a few though, and I believe they are
Python, JavaScript, Java and C/C++.

------
pinko
ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but
few people have heard of.

Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each
been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything
else on the web in terms of travel search.

Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.

~~~
cadr
What are the others?

~~~
mkramlich
He could tell you but then Google would have to buy them out. :)

------
vlad
From the FAQ:

 _ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site._

That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is
one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest
time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days
of travel.

<http://matrix2.itasoftware.com>

~~~
amirmc
That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was
something like that for a while.

I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).

~~~
bl4k
Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I
expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the
travel market pronto

~~~
teamonkey
I would expect it to be fully integrated into Google Maps. You can already
find a route from A to B using other forms of public transport.

------
blackswan
Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they
own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link
between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with
their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links
to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for
companies like Orbitz ahead?

Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another
high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their
first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect
these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to
decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they
scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in
its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary
search with a independent aggregator.

------
alexdong
I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like
Microsoft built Money.

Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel
industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm
disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for
growth. Allow me to explain.

I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create
values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding
into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of
(needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any
desktop software market that has a rapid growth.

There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is
still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between
"who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry
shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the
company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better?

Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case
where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.

~~~
jmount
"I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have
to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who
had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that
many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T
lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people
started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to
give away. A very different world than now.

~~~
hga
" _AT &T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix._"

Perhaps. They started with BSD (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi>),
suing the initial commercial BSD vendor and the university proper. They
utterly lost when it was shown they hadn't followed the BSD license with BSD
code they'd incorpated in their own versions, that had been licensed to others
and that were used for their own operations (they were thrown a face saving
bone in the settlement that required a relative handful of BSD files to be re-
written, but were otherwise skunked).

I'm not sure why they stopped doing this, although it's telling that Novell
bought UNIX(TM) in the middle of the year in which AT&T settled with Berkeley.

------
jamesshamenski
Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a
lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic.

Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now
shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.

~~~
c1sc0
I'm working for kind of a big travel portal and yes, we are shitting ourselves
to the point that at least I am considering switching industries. I'm not even
sure they did it for the content as much as for access to the raw data.

~~~
hga
Raw, _massaged_ data. From everything we've been reading ("the industry
worships syntax, not semantics"), turning those data flows into something
comprehensible is a major trick.

ITA's start in this reminds me of the FU MIT delivered to Xerox when MIT
bought their first big mainframe Xerox laser printer in the early '80s. Xerox
wanted $100K to reveal the format, so instead a group just took one or more
output tapes (a normal data flow was the mainframe wrote to tape and the
printer read them) and decoded it.

------
Oxryly
Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...

~~~
jrockway
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out.
Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what
I've been told.

~~~
brlewis
A tip I picked up from one of pg's essays for finding out what technology a
company uses: look at their job listings; they don't lie.

In the "Operations" part of the company it appears you're right, "most work is
in Python": <http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167>

In "Engineering", Lisp tops the "particularly valuable" list at the bottom of
"Knowledge and Skills" for
<http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130>

Farther down the same page they ask you to solve puzzles. "Puzzles submitted
in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because
those are the languages we use every day"

~~~
lg
we should add ruby to that.

~~~
gnuvince
We really shouldn't.

~~~
outotrai
If you (or someone else) wouldn't mind taking the time to explain it, I'd
really like to know why your unsupported and vaguely anti-Ruby statement is so
popular. I'm assuming that it means that the problems with Ruby are so widely
known that you don't even need to spell them out in order for people to agree
with you, but I guess I didn't get the memo. Why "really shouldn't" we?
(Serious question - thanks.)

~~~
lispm
One thing, of all the dynamic languages the default Ruby implementation is by
far the slowest. For anything that is slighty computational expensive, the
default Ruby implementation is poor. Also think green, if you have lots of
computation in a slow language, that easily adds up in a large data center in
form of wasted electricity, which adds to cooling and is generally expensive.
Some Ruby implementations try to get in the direction of, say, a Lisp
implementation like SBCL - which is used by ITA. SBCL provides since quite
some time a compiler that can generate reasonably fast code.

~~~
hga
In Dan Weinreb's "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" talk he
mentioned that SBCL was being used for QPX because of the quality of its
compiled code (as I recall they started out with CMU CL so this was a natural
choice).

For REs, Clozure CL was being used in part because faster compile times were
more important and run time preformance was more than adequate; stateless
business middleware is a very different beast than compute intensive route
construction, where we can be sure the cutoff in optimizing choices is based
on response time.

There were other reasons for Clozure CL, including the fact that it has a
company behind it, one who's principles Dan and others have had long
relationships with and ITA was buying one (man?)day a week of their services
to support RES. SBCL is (has always been?) a volunteer effort.

------
mmaunder
If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is:

<http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/> (Watch the video. It's priceless)

Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries.

So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry
a little more seriously than they have been.

~~~
VMG
a very microsofty video indeed

------
adatta02
strong move - shot across the bow at Bing/Farecast. I wonder where we'll start
seeing integrations.

------
alanh
> Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online.

 _FEWER THAN HALF?_ Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?

~~~
ben1040
Corporate travel agents make up the majority of the other half, I bet.

~~~
alalonde
Yes, corporate travel is a huge market, but service companies like
Christopherson are probably becoming less relevant in light of all this new
competition. Wouldn't be surprised if Google took this on..

------
petdog
Some funded sbcl work would be good.

------
dryicerx
Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future
assuming Google will take this to a whole new level.

I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz

~~~
mkramlich
In the near term, may be no major impact (visible to their respective users
anyway, though there will be ripples under the hood.) Longer term, generally
some flavor of bad. However, as others have mentioned, one silver lining in
this event is that it may increase demand for some sort of pseudo-ITA
replacement company upstart to slide in sideways and takeover providing this
service. Perhaps new ventures will be formed to do exactly this. But there
will also be chilling effects on other enterprises and projects. So it's
really hard to say.

It definitely takes Google one step closer to a position where they can make
Kayak/Orbitz-like sites a little more irrelevant. Are they all the way there
yet? Of course not. Also, Google has a track record of being pretty shitty in
certain areas (like customer service, especially human contact, voices and
bodies, etc.) and so those are areas where they can still differentiate. Plus,
there's still no sign of Google wanting to get into taking the booking orders.
Just the fare/trip search. Search of any kind is something that clearly their
infrastructure and scale is going to have massive competitive advantages in
delivering. Booking: not really. And many OTA's and metasearch sites make
their profit on booking fees and kickbacks, not really on search itself, which
for them is more of a cost center (though they do sometimes monetize those use
cases too in various ways as well -- this is where they will hurt the most, in
medium term).

Also, Google has said it plans to honor the existing ITA contracts. But who
knows how long or how pervasive that will be in the future. I personally know
of one startup that came _very_ close to signing a contract to get service
from ITA and we actually backed down ultimately, in part, because of the fear
of lock-in to their service. Plus they were expensive. ITA is/was a bit like
the Oracle of fare search products. Good shit, but really expensive shit. At
least for a wee little startup.

------
hga
Dan Weinreb has made some comments on the acquisition, the future of Lisp at
ITA/Google, etc.: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299>

------
mhp
Antitrust?

------
mkramlich
_gigantic_ move in the travel industry

ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could
cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement.

(I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to
some travel startups)

~~~
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?

~~~
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
This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though
maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every
company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)

~~~
jsz0
I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people
aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get
a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing
a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob
-- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they
really needed to gobble up AdMob to be successful there.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer
to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather
than join a large corporation, even Google.

And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating
those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.

~~~
hga
How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know
about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess
there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's
unlikely they've been 100% successful.

~~~
mkramlich
Some hits, some misses. It's hard for anybody to say with authority just how
many should have been hits but were not. I think it's unrealistic to expect
ALL of them to be a net win. Nobody can predict the future, not even Google.

NOTE TO SELF: start a web-based service that successfully predicts the future.
Sell out to Google.

