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Where can I fly for how much?

kayak.com

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Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#51

Post by nooneelse »

orblivion wrote: post #27
nooneelse wrote: post #25

For more visual intuitiveness, perhaps some isolines or a 3d, height based on price kind of thing? Probably just flashiness for no end though. But, using different colors for the labels along the price axis probably wouldn't be. Seems to be &-ing the checkboxes, which is a bit odd for the languages.

Isolines I'm not sure, the market does weird things with pricing, something further away may end up being cheaper.

Yeah, it would look very much like messy islands/mountains, probably lots of extra lines for little helpful effect. That is why the height map occurred to me. But, like I said, that might be getting too close to flashy, spinning-whizzbang infographic land.

Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#53

Post by jojopotato »

tomhoward wrote: post #41
bryanh wrote: post #2

Wow, talk about impressive. Just curious about the tech behind this. Do they just cache a bunch of average prices together between major airports and just set a max limit? Surely it can't do fully comprehensive search at the speed it runs at.

Their database only contains cached results from previous searches. Kayak doesn't store the entire population of flights themselves - they forward users' queries onto a 3rd party flight inventory provider (ITA Software), then cache the results to power services like these. This means that results are likely to be current and complete on popular routes, but far less so on the long tail.

If I had to guess, they probably cache as aggressively as their contract with ITA allows because Kayak gets charged per search by ITA.

*edit: From the two ITA contract that I know/have heard about anyways.

Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#55

Post by nooneelse »

jojopotato wrote: post #34
bryanh wrote: post #2

Wow, talk about impressive. Just curious about the tech behind this. Do they just cache a bunch of average prices together between major airports and just set a max limit? Surely it can't do fully comprehensive search at the speed it runs at.

They're definitely showing you historical prices from their cache. Kayak gets such a huge volume of traffic that they can use the lowest price on that route seen in the last 24 hours and have pretty good coverage/accuracy. Personally, this thread is eye opening because I work on a similar product. I saw this when it came out (a couple weeks ago maybe). My first impression wasn't that it was particularly impressive, b…

The novice sometimes has "the potential" fogging their view of reality. While for the expert, sometimes the shadow from what-is-lacking mountain covers both.

Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#57

Post by bkrausz »

martythemaniak wrote: post #4

OMG, I've been waiting for someone to build something like this forever. I've always hated the fact that all major travel sites work based on the assumption that you already know exactly when and where you're going, rather than at least giving you the option to explore your options.

The problem you have is that flight data is incredibly fast-changing and computationally expensive to get. So in order to get enough data for this you need to do a lot of long queries very often. Companies that provide pricing information (like ITA, who Kayak uses) charge a lot for these resources, so it's not like the usual internet where your incremental cost per user or search is minimal: there's a real cost here. The entire architecture was build on one-off "price from X to Y on this day", building a layer of generality to that is fairly difficult.

Full disclosure: I used to work at TripAdvisor on flights.

Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#58

Post by borism »

bbatsell wrote: post #49
borism wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my problem is, I know my travel dates (mid-August) and I know my budget, but still not sure where to go. Unfortunately Kayak searches (including this very cool hack) are useless at solving that. P.S. ITA Software Matrix is good at this if you have a list of places, but not for random destinations.

What am I missing, why is this useless? You can specify your budget as the max price, and the "Thinking about" to August 2010. Granted, you can't specify "mid-August", but within a single month, usually airfares only change based on the days of the week of both segments.

didn't notice "thinking about" menu. sorry, my bad!

Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#59

Post by thefool »

I just wish it had the option to find all available flights under a certain price. I'm a college student and wouldn't mind just randomly going to a random local for a little while if it was cheap enough.

Re: Where can I fly for how much?

#60

Post by bond »

borism wrote: post #37
Rabidgremlin wrote: post #35

Built this 3 years ago for Air New Zealand :) http://promos.airnz.co.nz/howfar/

very cool! ANZ rocks! P.S. I'd buy one-way Rarotonga ticket in no time... the problem is, I'm at the other side of the Globe from AKL :)

I was just talking to my brother in Auckland about the price to Rarotonga! Paradise only at $270, crazy price!
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