

Design: How close is too close? Bing Travel vs. Kayak - ratsbane
http://douglassims.org/bing-kayak/

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aneesh
Bing Travel's design is almost exactly what Farecast -- acquired by MS in
early 2008, and part of Live Search -- has had for at least the past year
(maybe more, I first visited Farecast about a year ago).

Farecast and Kayak have had a very similar design for quite a while. I'm not
sure whose design came first. But to suggest that Bing Travel copied Kayak
right now is simply wrong.

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noodle
kayak was first with some version that resembles their current design, which
farecast eventually kind of emulated, and the two have been slowly converging
ever since.

iirc, of course. i'm an early-ish user of both sites.

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trickjarrett
Wikipedia confirms this, dating Kayak.com as founded in 2004 and Farecast as
2006.

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codyrobbins
Speaking of how close is too close, I've never understood why anyone uses
sites like Farecast or Kayak or Expedia at all. I've been using ITA's QPX
directly for years — it's at <http://matrix.itasoftware.com>. As another
commenter mentioned, ITA supplies the backend for a number of these sites. QPX
had a month-long search way before any of the other sites, which is useful for
me since I rarely have to travel on specific dates. And it doesn't try to sell
you hotels or rental cars. In fact, all of the so-called "value adds" that
distinguish the sites relying on the backend data are things that I find
incredibly distracting and useless. QPX also doesn't have a habit of showing
fares that don't actually exist, which happens on every other airfare search
site I've ever used. Note that I have nothing to do with ITA Software,
although from my love for them it sounds like I do.

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sounddust
I just priced a major trip I'm taking later this summer. Expedia's lowest
price beats ITA's (on the exact same itinerary - same flight numbers and
times) by $462 ($1,849 vs $1,387)

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codyrobbins
Well, exactly my point was that other sites tend to show lower prices that
sound great but that don't actually exist. Did you actually purchase the fares
at that lower price, or just price them out? Every time one of those other
sites has shown me a lower price than ITA, actually trying to purchase the
airfare at that price always results in the same sort of bait and switch
message, 'We're sorry, but that fare is no longer available — displaying the
next lowest fare.' And the next fare is always the fare originally found by
ITA or higher. From my experience the other sites are highly deceptive, but
your mileage may vary.

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sounddust
Yes, I actually purchased it from Expedia for $462 less. Somehow I doubt that
ITA would have done the opposite, and says "hey, we found a lower price!"
right before purchase. By the way, both Kayak and Orbitz had the price which
was $462 higher as well.

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ajross
This is mostly settled law in the US. "Look and Feel" of an interface is not
itself subject to copyright. Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland were both
decided back in the 80's, with the now-standard interpretation that only the
implementation of a software work is copyrightable, not its interface.

So unless Bing is copying javascript, logos, or graphics from Kayak, I can't
see what the issue here would be. Mere page layout and behavior should be a
problem.

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altano
> Thanks to Glenn, Hayes, Yazan, Peter, Mark, Jeff, Hemant, and others for
> reviewing drafts of this.

That's asking a lot of people to review 3 paragraphs.

~~~
DTrejo
Only the best for HN!

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timcederman
I wonder what Owen's (ojbyrne) thoughts on this are? The new TripAdvisor meta-
search looks quite similar too.

Personally I'm all for cribbing the best parts of other people's design.

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ojbyrne
We take a little pride in that our design was developed independently from
(but informed by) kayak (we think it's better in some ways). Personally I
spent an inordinate amount of time on various cues around our slider handles
just because user testing revealed that a lot of people didn't know what to do
with them.

If you want to see really close copies go try fly.com or the recently launched
trax.com. They're blatant ripoffs of the kayak design.

Products with the same function are often going to converge to similar
appearances. Just look at spreadsheets, word processors, etc.

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timcederman
I completely agree. I actually quite like what you've done with the
TripAdvisor meta-search, it's certainly close to what I would've done. :)

~~~
ojbyrne
Correcting a minor oversight by saying... Thank you. ;-)

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bkrausz
I've heard that before with other airfare search sites. The funny thing is,
when I worked for Yahoo Real Estate back in 2007, they looked very similar to
this too. The ideas used here are not new, especially not to the Travel
industry. In fact, refinements with drag bars for time and price are available
on many sites.

I feel like this is saying that IE and FF are too close. No one calls foul on
it (at least not too often) because there are some paradigms for how browsers
work, just as there are for "best deal" price aggregators.

The real money-makers will be the ones who can ignore these paradigms and find
a more innovative way to do things.

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encoderer
This is off the deep end. I personally find the premise a little silly but the
least you could've done is shown the two screenshots without injecting your
own commentary.

And to answer the question posed in your last paragraph: Yes, you can do all
of that. Kayak didn't _invent_ that interface, that is, it's not patentable.
Nor is most of what was done by Amazon, Ebay, etc. You can indeed create an
identical copy of Amazon, as long as you leave off 1-click :)

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seshagiric
How is this different from saying BestBuy and Fry's are copying one or each
other.

When two businesses sell the same stuff there is bound to be some similarity
between how they lay out their shops.

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outcyde
I don't know if anyone is copying anyone here. Its possible the engines are
being licensed from a third party company which would explain the similar
look.

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trickjarrett
Bing's engine was previously a site called Farecast which Microsoft bought.
Kayak.com is another startup altogether which developed their application as
well. They're definitely different back ends :)

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lanstein
Kayak is ITA's QPX engine on the back end - Lisp :)

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aresant
What bugs me is that these questions are framed differently when it's people
copying MSFT. EG - Google spreadsheet's interface. EG - Writely. etc.

Good UI's are copied relentlessly.

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rbanffy
I don't even know where to start.

Google spreadsheets does not look like Excel that much. The only thing in
common between them is the button bar and a fake menu bar, but all of that was
present in Mac applications well before Multiplan took the shape that inspired
Excel on Windows 2. I would even risk that a lot of that was taken from the
Xerox Star series.

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aresant
We agree - everything copies everything. It's continual movement forward.

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fallentimes
Not as close as Fly.com.

