Google to launch flight search service soon | Hacker News Reader

Google to launch flight search service soon

venturebeat.com

57 pointshydrazine24 comments

I really hope they have smart combinatoric search. I want to be able to search flexible day, flexible airport, multi-leg world travel trips without making my own spreadsheet. Some services do flexible day, some do flexible airport, but I haven't found any that provide these with a multi-leg itinerary. I'm sure this is due to the computational complexity, but Google could handle it.

Both OAG and Innovata provide a dump of all possible flight schedules for the next few months (which includes multiple legs and airlines). It is trivial to add the multiple day/airport feature: I've had a vanilla mysql install (on a P4 with a 1gig ram - my dev machine, sadly) return exactly the sort of stuff you mentioned in less than 100ms, so I'm sure the computational complexity is pretty irrelevant at Google's scale.

Is any of that data free/cheap for experimentation?

A co-founder of the company I did the work for had a few contacts in both companies, so we were able to secure the data through them. It definitely isn't publicly available, but I imagine if you talked to a regional representative at either company, you could get them to generate a sample data dump for you (a gigantic CSV file, for example)

Kayak used to have a free API, but they shut it down "because of constly misuse". I'm not aware of any other service that's targeted at individual developers - most of these APIs are intended for huge companies with correspondingly deep pockets.

ITA's Matrix beta site (http://matrix.itasoftware.com) does both flexible day and flexible airport for multi-leg trips. To do multiple airports, type in the airport codes separated by commas: "lax,sfo".

Wow. This is going to be interesting. Adioso.com (YC) is an amazing site, Google are going to have to try pretty hard to beat them for Australia, considering what Adioso.com can do without buying out a massive company.

Hipmunk looks similar to ITA Software's flight search tool, so it'll be interesting to see Google's take. If Google builds it, they will come.

To paraphrase Steven Tyler, they won't have to come - they're already there.

I wonder if it will have Google+ integration from day one. Planning vacations together, or making sure you're never in the same town as someone? Maybe timing your visit to coincide with a candidate's campaign, or "facilitating serendipity" with people who will be at your destination at the same time. With circles and sparks, this could get real interesting....

Curious to see the customer service aspect of the airline booking business.

Ah... but would it be better than Hipmunk?

I smell fresh acquisitions in the air.

Or, another failed startup. This is the scary road you tread when you're in a space that might raise the eyebrows of a company like Google. High risk, high reward. I wish them luck!

Yeah, Hipmunk is really great. The experience is so good I actually sort of wish I flew more often... or at least had to schedule flights more often.

It'd be cool if they could handle other itinerary and reservation tasks. Though I don't know how they'd necessarily make money like that.

Well, the money's in hotel reservations, so I guess it's in the pipeline.

Exactly, which I'm curious if GOOG will incorporate hotel reservations in it all.

Man Google has it covered. I'm trying hard to think of an online space they're not in.

I guess you gotta start thinking offline, then. inb4 Google buys your company ;p

Actually google does hotel pricing already in maps. It's not super obvious, but do a search for "hotels in San francisco" and you should see some prices

Hipmunk already does hotels: http://www.hipmunk.com/hotels

I tried Hipmunk for the first time last week. I really enjoyed searching flights by "agony". Unfortunately I learned the hard way that all Delta flights should be put at the very end of the list when sorted in such a way.

Man, the arbitrary downvoting on HN is starting to get out of control.

(downvote away)

Google might acquire Hipmunk which already uses GWT.

No, we don't.

Why do you think Hipmunk uses GWT (by which I assume you mean Google Web Toolkit)? The source for www.hipmunk.com pulls in jquery, but doesn't have the history iframe or <module>.nocache.js reference that one would expect to see for a GWT application.

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