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Comment by dlhavema | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. A scraper scraping a scraper. I don't get what the value add is over clients just searching Google Flights directly. Not trying to be mean, just trying to understand.

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Google Flights isn’t a scraper, it’s an evolution of ITA matrix from what I remember, directly connected to that GDS. They aren’t piggy backing on someone else’s servers.

Which is what this guy could have done, instead of behaving like pond scum. It’s not like it’s particularly complicated to get programmatic access to a GDS API, that’s what they’re there for.

Cool. I did not know that. Thanks for the clarification.

It’s expensive to get access to a GDS API and, from what I’ve heard, the data they provide is quite difficult to work with. There’s a reason Google bought ITA for $700m, right? If this project ever grows, it could make sense to pull from a GDS.

> It’s expensive to get access to a GDS API and, from what I’ve heard, the data they provide is quite difficult to work with.

Well, it’s expensive to provide live answers for flight search queries across hundreds of airlines and thousands of airports... Some of the old booking interfaces are ugly, but for simple searching most of them provide relatively sane REST/JSON

I don’t understand your attitude, steal it until you make it?

That's the attitude of just about every successful company in history. Once large enough, some of them (e.g. YouTube) even force industrial changes to accommodate all the theft that made them successful.

Meanwhile on the topic of attitudes, referring to a startup as 'pond scum' simply because they scrape an extremely expensive data set, especially regarding an industry with a long and controversial history of strategies designed to avoid price transparency.. hmm.

Pond scum? He's scraping some data from a company that got rich scraping data and that probably will tell him to stop doing it. I mean if he's pond scum, what level of scum are those guys with upshot sites? What level of scum is Mark Zuckerberg? Pond scum is generally supposed to be pretty scummy, I can think of thousands of people more scummy than someone scraping from google.

Well, Google Flights is probably the best publicly available data on flight prices.

> Brisk Voyage finds cheap, last-minute weekend trips for our members. The basic idea is that we continuously check a bunch of flight and hotel prices, and when we find a trip that’s a low-priced outlier, we send an email with booking instructions.

Edit: Ok, this could actually be interesting. At least in the short while. .)

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