Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
ITA's start in this reminds me of the FU MIT delivered to Xerox when MIT bought their first big mainframe Xerox laser printer in the early '80s. Xerox wanted $100K to reveal the format, so instead a group just took one or more output tapes (a normal data flow was the mainframe wrote to tape and the printer read them) and decoded it.
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.
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/03/experiment-to-sho...