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Comment by vlad | Hacker News Reader

From the FAQ:

ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site.

That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel.

http://matrix2.itasoftware.com

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Although it's a bit of a reach to say that they "market" matrix/matrix2... It isn't terribly nice to use, they don't actively promote it, and they don't allocate it very much processing power.

That being said, I have always gotten the impression that they maintain it as a sort of testbed -- a huge number of Flyertalkers use matrix for very esoteric queries, and I'd imagine the feedback that ITA gets from those users is invaluable.

That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was something like that for a while.

I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).

Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the travel market pronto

I would expect it to be fully integrated into Google Maps. You can already find a route from A to B using other forms of public transport.

Bing has been doing something like this for a little while now (through their acquisition of farecast.) Check it out: http://www.bing.com/travel/flight/flexibleTravel?dm=07%2F02%...

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