Great implementation. Recently I've been playing with skyscanner and HipMunk. This will definitely replace them for me when international support arrives.
Google Flight Search
41–50 of 288 posts
Re: Google Flight Search
#42Is it me, or that app is super fast?
It probably is caching data from other people's searches, similar to what Kayak does. This is cool right up until you try to actually book a flight and it sells out or goes up in price dramatically.
Re: Google Flight Search
#43Just for some context, here's the previous HN discussion when Google announced their acquisition of ITA in July 2010.
Re: Google Flight Search
#44It's quite scary that a company like Google can come along and shit in a startup's cereal practically overnight.
I know we were all rooting for The 'Munk, but it seems that Google's use of Price x Duration matrix effectively steals the thunder from Hipmunk's agony filter.
I mean, it's not as if Google needs the affiliate revenue, and I bet the Hipmunk guys would have preferred it had Google decided to "organise the world's information" through an acquisition. I think I'd need a good cry if this happened to me :(
Re: Google Flight Search
#45General question here. Almost all flight search sites default the search dates to about 3 weeks out. Now, I find this annoying but I'm wondering if its done because there is statistical evidence that most customers search in that range of time, or rather if it's just what someone thought would be a good idea by "following their intuition".
The rule of thumb that I've heard was that anything about a month out represented the 'normal' price.
If you're buying a ticket for a flight less than a month away, the prices start to rise dramatically as the flight date draws nearer. But if you're buying a ticket for a flight more than a month away, it's more-or-less the same price as a flight that's a month away. [1]
So absent any other information, the 'normal' price can help people ballpark costs more quickly, something I'd expect to be statistically more common than actually searching to book a specific flight on specific dates.
[1] With exceptions for destinations with very defined/popular seasons, holidays and things like that.
Re: Google Flight Search
#46It’s rather powerful: as long as the origin airport is one of those shown on the map, and the destination airport is reachable via a domestic flight on one of the major airlines (AA, AS, B6, CO, DL, F9, UA, US), the search results come back instantaneously. Multiple origins and destinations (up to five of each) are supported as well:
http://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=LAX,SFO,SEA,LAS,DEN;...
And the results still come back immediately! Including the three-month chart of prices. This leads me to believe that Google/ITA has precomputed all of these results, and is simply serving these results out of a cache of some sort. That would explain why they are only offering a limited set of origin airports at this time: it probably takes an incredible amount of computing power and storage space to pre-calculate all of the possible results.
Colour me impressed.
Re: Google Flight Search
#47Re: Google Flight Search
#48Internally, this has been around for a little while (disclaimer: I work for Google but not on anything related to this). What continues to impress me about Google is: 1. Just how quickly this was built (really, it was quick); and 2. Google wants you to use our services because they're compelling not because we don't give you any other choice (ie "Don't be evil"). Sure there are limits to what it currently does but I…
Just curious about the backend. Python too or Lisp?
Why "Python too"?
Re: Google Flight Search
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The really bad news for hipmunk will be when google integrates it into their search results.
What do you mean by "integrates it into their search results"? Hipmunk's killer feature is the ability to easily visualize the flight in terms of the time you leave, the time you arrive and the time spent at various intermediate locations. It becomes more useful when there are no nonstop flights. Google is taking a different approach with their UI, which is fine. In terms of whether I'd use google or hipmunk to searc…
by "integrate into their search results" i mean.. if you search google for "sfo lax" and it brins up this new Google Flight page with their organic results.
Re: Google Flight Search
#50It's quite scary that a company like Google can come along and shit in a startup's cereal practically overnight. I know we were all rooting for The 'Munk, but it seems that Google's use of Price x Duration matrix effectively steals the thunder from Hipmunk's agony filter. I mean, it's not as if Google needs the affiliate revenue, and I bet the Hipmunk guys would have preferred it had Google decided to "organise the w…
It wasn't overnight. ITA has been doing flight search since forever. In fact, they even had the matrix UI before Hipmunk (though it wasn't featured as prominently):
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-company-that-HipMunk-copied...