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Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

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Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#121

Post by albertzeyer »

alec wrote: post #44
Alex3917 wrote: post #14

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 sav…

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 cus…

Still far away from what I want to see.

I want to know which is the easiest and cheapest way to get from point X to point Y (with a few options/alternatives I can choose from) at a rough time range. And that is any possible combination of train, car or airplane or whatever.

The nearby-feature is already nice (and I haven't even really seen that elsewhere) but I still found myself too limited. For example I don't care if I have to travel maybe 500km or even 1000km by train to another airport if that can save me 500€ or so.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#122

Post by lispm »

outotrai wrote: post #119
gnuvince wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really shouldn't.

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.)

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.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#123

Post by zandorg »

alanh wrote: post #55

> Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online. FEWER THAN HALF? Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?

My Mum was going online for flights yesterday (though she's never been one to go to a travel agent). I pointed her to Orbitz. She was impressed, but another (UK-based) website she'd tried was $200 cheaper than anything on Orbitz. Not sure why.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#124

Post by hga »

lispm wrote: post #122
outotrai wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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 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.

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