41–50 of 125 posts
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ (Watch the video. It's priceless)
Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries.
So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.
Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic. Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
OK, you could say that a QPX suggested route is content, but it's algorithmically built from on the fly constantly updated airline content. Very much like classical Google web search.
Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic. Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-sho...
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…
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 customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front page.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
Unlikely that they will go away from lisp. They are heavy users of SBCL (performance) and CCL (fast compile) and have some interesting fraction of a million lines of lisp code and might just be one of the larger employers of lisp programmers. See http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-br...
The critical infrastructure pieces (where GC is an issue) are already in C++. The front-end is already in Java. A full scale re-write will be a dumb thing to do. It's not going to be difficult to have Common Lisp FFI to hook the ITA middleware into Google's infrastructure instead of ITA's.
The software that ITA developers that makes them different from the rest (I am guessing lots of these are heuristic solutions to NP complete problems) is exactly the sweet spot for Common Lisp, where it provides a significant advantage over other languages even for large groups of programmers. While I will enjoy writing a web app in Common Lisp much more so than writing a web app in Java (less boiler plate, interesting language compensates for a mundane task) I doubt there are going to be great advantages to doing the more routine development in CL for a large corporation.
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…
ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but few people have heard of. Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything else on the web in terms of travel search. Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.
There's no business reason to, but if they managed to integrate data from SeatCounter into that view, it would rock my world.
Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic. Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
Huh? How is this content? QPX is "searching" on airline provided content. OK, you could say that a QPX suggested route is content, but it's algorithmically built from on the fly constantly updated airline content. Very much like classical Google web search.
Do you think that Expedia and the rest are thrilled to see this move by Google. The OTA have stopped the disintermediation at consolidation and economy of scale, now they will have to go farther or someone else will.
If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/ (Watch the video. It's priceless) Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries. So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.