ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement.
(I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)
However, ITA is not the only option out there, and given the concerns I bet everyone has with their contracts there's now room for another data provider to jump in and snatch up contracts during renegotiations.
A general rule of thumb I find valid is if there's some consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of computation, Google will get into it. They certainly have the infrastructure for it.
(I'm a former TripAdvisor Flights engineer, which is owned by Expedia)
Not bitter at all, hmmmm
My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that Google can do to really change things beyond how ITA already has?
MSN :: AA ORD AA X AZ
BLQ :: AZ X AA ORD AA
...which means I want an American Airlines flight from Madison, WI, connecting through O'Hare, and continuing on to Bologna, Italy, with one and only one intermediate connection, with the over-the-pond leg on AA, and the final leg on Alitalia.
It can then lay out the options for me graphically, so I can instantly see which flights have nasty layovers or bad schedules without having to parse a single text digit.
It's not just about price.
(only 90% sure, i can't find my notes to confirm right now. i had to know this a few months ago for work reasons)
"ITA's QPX software tool for organizing flight information is used by leading airlines and travel distributors worldwide including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Bing, Continental Airlines, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and others."
so like i said... gigantic move in the travel industry :)
Even if Google made no significant changes to the behavior of ITA's existing code, if they instead just tweaked it to run on say millions of cores, highly distributed and parallelized in Google data centers, with gajillions of cached results -- endusers would probably be able to see better, fresher, more "long tail-y & last mile-y" and faster results. I'm just making an educated guess here, I could be wrong if there's some fundamental bottleneck in the ITA architecture I haven't considered (and someone chime in if you know that to be the case) but I don't think this will be an issue.
There's a C++ backend that collects and massages the various data streams and then loads the data into an in memory database. Much of that is quite parallelizable, e.g there are various data sources, the massaging probably needs only so much global state, etc.
The computational front end is an SBCL process that does its magic based on a copy of the in memory database. One process, one query at a time, that scales out very nicely.
I suspect the biggest tricks besides groking the data (hard since it's so messy and special cased) and their secret sauce that does the routing is maintaining the required availability. There I suspect ITA's service/operations culture has things it can teach the corresponding Google culture.
to differentiate from old fashioned bodies-in-seats-in-office-somewhere travel agencies that you had to call, fax or stroll into in person. Agents there typically sat in front of either a terminal connected to a GDS like Galileo, or, more recently, a Windows box with native apps doing approximately the same thing. Agents would perform queries for you on their computers and they sometimes had to type in a sort of mini-language full of various commands and brief codes.