
Google in talks to buy ITA - paddy_m
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/google_travel_buy/
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iamelgringo
Google needs ITA.

The one place where Google is getting spanked by Bing is in travel search.
Bing travel is IMHO hands down the best fare search engine out there, and I
travel a lot. <http://matrix.itasoftware.com> site comes in second place for
me, even though it looks like crap.

It has some insanely useful tools for a mileage runner such as myself. For
instance, ITA has a domain specific language that you can use to search for
fares. What I use it all the time for, is to find the cheapest fare between
two cities on a single airline over the course of the next month.

~~~
elai
How about kayak? Kayak buzz is extremely useful [not to mention a nice iphone
app], and works for all pairs of cities while bing travel only has a limited
amount of pairs.

~~~
jfarmer
Both Kayak and Bing are powered at least in part by ITA. Kayak is to Mint as
ITA is to Yodlee.

~~~
byoung2
Better stated: ITA is to Kayak as Yodlee is to Mint

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mathewgj
By far the most important aspect of this potential deal has been totally
overlooked in the articles and comments I've read so far.

ITA powers Kayak & Bing/Farecast and has the direct relationship with the
airlines. ITA is foundational to travel search in a way that Kayak or
Bing/Farecast is not.

~~~
jey
Excellent point. I wonder if that could create regulatory/antitrust problems
for a Google acquisition of ITA?

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djb_hackernews
They pay their engineers REALLY well. ITA had some pretty interesting open
problems for prospective engineering applicants a few years back while I was
looking.

The problems were definitely google-esque.

~~~
riffer
<http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html>

~~~
icefox
The Sling Blade Runner puzzle is my favorite. Been hacking on and off on it
for the past three years. Every six months or so I come back and spent a few
weekends on it. So many different ways to approach the problem. Genetic
algorithms, graph simplification, splitting, and pruning algorithms, graph key
node analysis, all sorts of different traveling salesman approaches, not to
mention creating super small/fast brute force, there is always something new
to try against it. Even generated various images of the graph with dot just
for kicks. If anyone is looking for a problem to try this would be one I
recommend to try. Going by number of movies you should have no problem getting
more then 200 in length and with something better (or luck) over 300. Have
something really good and you can get above 320 :)

~~~
swah
Just got over 9000 with a snippet in Perl, using regular expressions.

~~~
wglb
You might want to check your code. Since each title can be used at most once
in the solution and there are 6589 movies, it would seem that there are at
most 3294 possible solutions, no?

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tlack
This is a brilliant idea from Google's perspective. The travel industry is
very very profitable, and a lot of the travel shopping process is basically
the hunt for information - tell me where I can stay, how much, give me
options, etc. This is a problem Google could really optimize.

~~~
gaius
How do you figure that? Airlines are losing money like it's going out of
fashion.

~~~
failquicker
Well how I see it, the Airlines are losing money. Not the travel search sites.
They still take their cut no matter what the margins look like for the
underlying airlines. And it is a lot of revenue, even if not a lot of profit(I
doubt that, but don't have relavent experience/documentation to back that up).
And at the very least the travel search itself brings a LOT of eyeballs, which
google has interest in.

On an unrelated note, ATI's co-founder Dave Baggett was on the founding team
for the original "Crash Bandicoot"...which is awesome.

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futuremint
If Google bought them, would they force ITA to rewrite their C++ / Lisp engine
in Java?

~~~
zandorg
I think Lisp would be one reason TO buy them. Google needs a Lisp team and I
imagine they realise this.

~~~
gaius
Not at all <http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html>

    
    
        The conversation went something like this:
    
        Me:  I'd like to talk to you about something...
        Him: Let me guess - you want to use Smalltalk.
        Me:  Er, no...
        Him: Lisp?
        Me: Right.
        Him:  No way.
    
        And that was the end of Lisp at Google.

~~~
silverlake
I believe "him" was Urs Holzle, who built runtimes for Self, Samlltalk and
Java (which was later bought by Sun). Urs knows way more about these languages
than Gat. His "no way" should be enough for anyone.

~~~
gaius
OK, but Ron Garrett's no lightweight either:
[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a2...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a289d3f6)

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robk
this doesn't make a ton of sense. A (majority?) good share of ITA's profits
are from sales to other traffic search sites and directly to airlines.
Google's never had a strength in selling to other enterprises and surely
doesn't want to manage yet another enterprise software sales team. I find it
unlikely this purchase would go through given they'd be paying for the
enterprise software portion when they only want the consumer engine portion.

~~~
hga
I partly agree, Google's operations just aren't of high enough quality in
terms of uptime for the QPX market. It's one thing to be shut out of Gmail for
a half hour, quite another to not be able to book tickets for any long period
of time.

This acquisition only makes sense if the QPX operations parts of ITA stay
separate from Google; in general, Google would have to avoid "Googlizing"
operations and probably the working code base as well.

QRES, though, isn't as far as we know isn't in good shape WRT to its potential
market due to the Great Recession and now the Iceland volcano and its one
customer (Air Canada) suspended its formal involvement in it (now's just not a
good time to make a switch). I wouldn't be surprised if that got spun off or
more likely canceled. I'm assuming ITA's leaders are shopping around the
company or at least entertaining offers due to it's poor prospects for the
foreseeable future, it's a very good idea with very bad timing.

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wglb
So could it be that google doesn't have enough _boffins_ , being from the west
coast? From the article: _founded in the mid-90s by boffins from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology_

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swah
Does the codebase matters more than the ideabase?

