Design: How close is too close? Bing Travel vs. Kayak | Hacker News Reader

Design: How close is too close? Bing Travel vs. Kayak

douglassims.org

49 pointsratsbane25 comments

Bing Travel's design is almost exactly what Farecast -- acquired by MS in early 2008, and part of Live Search -- has had for at least the past year (maybe more, I first visited Farecast about a year ago).

Farecast and Kayak have had a very similar design for quite a while. I'm not sure whose design came first. But to suggest that Bing Travel copied Kayak right now is simply wrong.

kayak was first with some version that resembles their current design, which farecast eventually kind of emulated, and the two have been slowly converging ever since.

iirc, of course. i'm an early-ish user of both sites.

Wikipedia confirms this, dating Kayak.com as founded in 2004 and Farecast as 2006.

Speaking of how close is too close, I've never understood why anyone uses sites like Farecast or Kayak or Expedia at all. I've been using ITA's QPX directly for years — it's at http://matrix.itasoftware.com. As another commenter mentioned, ITA supplies the backend for a number of these sites. QPX had a month-long search way before any of the other sites, which is useful for me since I rarely have to travel on specific dates. And it doesn't try to sell you hotels or rental cars. In fact, all of the so-called "value adds" that distinguish the sites relying on the backend data are things that I find incredibly distracting and useless. QPX also doesn't have a habit of showing fares that don't actually exist, which happens on every other airfare search site I've ever used. Note that I have nothing to do with ITA Software, although from my love for them it sounds like I do.

Having just spent the last year of my life on a team building a meta-search, I'll try to act unbiased. First of all for most people, ita isn't exactly user-friendly. Secondly in the meta-search arena, they're not comprehensive. There are prices available from the Online Travel Agencies that can beat the direct airline prices.

I just priced a major trip I'm taking later this summer. Expedia's lowest price beats ITA's (on the exact same itinerary - same flight numbers and times) by $462 ($1,849 vs $1,387)

Well, exactly my point was that other sites tend to show lower prices that sound great but that don't actually exist. Did you actually purchase the fares at that lower price, or just price them out? Every time one of those other sites has shown me a lower price than ITA, actually trying to purchase the airfare at that price always results in the same sort of bait and switch message, 'We're sorry, but that fare is no longer available — displaying the next lowest fare.' And the next fare is always the fare originally found by ITA or higher. From my experience the other sites are highly deceptive, but your mileage may vary.

Yes, I actually purchased it from Expedia for $462 less. Somehow I doubt that ITA would have done the opposite, and says "hey, we found a lower price!" right before purchase. By the way, both Kayak and Orbitz had the price which was $462 higher as well.

This is mostly settled law in the US. "Look and Feel" of an interface is not itself subject to copyright. Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland were both decided back in the 80's, with the now-standard interpretation that only the implementation of a software work is copyrightable, not its interface.

So unless Bing is copying javascript, logos, or graphics from Kayak, I can't see what the issue here would be. Mere page layout and behavior should be a problem.

> Thanks to Glenn, Hayes, Yazan, Peter, Mark, Jeff, Hemant, and others for reviewing drafts of this.

That's asking a lot of people to review 3 paragraphs.

Only the best for HN!

I wonder what Owen's (ojbyrne) thoughts on this are? The new TripAdvisor meta-search looks quite similar too.

Personally I'm all for cribbing the best parts of other people's design.

We take a little pride in that our design was developed independently from (but informed by) kayak (we think it's better in some ways). Personally I spent an inordinate amount of time on various cues around our slider handles just because user testing revealed that a lot of people didn't know what to do with them.

If you want to see really close copies go try fly.com or the recently launched trax.com. They're blatant ripoffs of the kayak design.

Products with the same function are often going to converge to similar appearances. Just look at spreadsheets, word processors, etc.

I completely agree. I actually quite like what you've done with the TripAdvisor meta-search, it's certainly close to what I would've done. :)

Correcting a minor oversight by saying... Thank you. ;-)

I've heard that before with other airfare search sites. The funny thing is, when I worked for Yahoo Real Estate back in 2007, they looked very similar to this too. The ideas used here are not new, especially not to the Travel industry. In fact, refinements with drag bars for time and price are available on many sites.

I feel like this is saying that IE and FF are too close. No one calls foul on it (at least not too often) because there are some paradigms for how browsers work, just as there are for "best deal" price aggregators.

The real money-makers will be the ones who can ignore these paradigms and find a more innovative way to do things.

This is off the deep end. I personally find the premise a little silly but the least you could've done is shown the two screenshots without injecting your own commentary.

And to answer the question posed in your last paragraph: Yes, you can do all of that. Kayak didn't invent that interface, that is, it's not patentable. Nor is most of what was done by Amazon, Ebay, etc. You can indeed create an identical copy of Amazon, as long as you leave off 1-click :)

How is this different from saying BestBuy and Fry's are copying one or each other.

When two businesses sell the same stuff there is bound to be some similarity between how they lay out their shops.

I don't know if anyone is copying anyone here. Its possible the engines are being licensed from a third party company which would explain the similar look.

Bing's engine was previously a site called Farecast which Microsoft bought. Kayak.com is another startup altogether which developed their application as well. They're definitely different back ends :)

Kayak is ITA's QPX engine on the back end - Lisp :)

What bugs me is that these questions are framed differently when it's people copying MSFT. EG - Google spreadsheet's interface. EG - Writely. etc.

Good UI's are copied relentlessly.

I don't even know where to start.

Google spreadsheets does not look like Excel that much. The only thing in common between them is the button bar and a fake menu bar, but all of that was present in Mac applications well before Multiplan took the shape that inspired Excel on Windows 2. I would even risk that a lot of that was taken from the Xerox Star series.

We agree - everything copies everything. It's continual movement forward.

Not as close as Fly.com.

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