Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50 miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time for an answer if I potentially stand to save a couple hundred bucks.

Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.

ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but few people have heard of.<p>Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything else on the web in terms of travel search.<p>Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.

From the FAQ:<p><i>ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site.</i><p>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.<p><a href="http://matrix2.itasoftware.com" rel="nofollow">http://matrix2.itasoftware.com</a>

Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead?<p>Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.

I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&#38;T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money.<p>Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain.<p>I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of (needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any desktop software market that has a rapid growth.<p>There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between "who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better?<p>Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.

Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic.<p>Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.

Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...

If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is:<p><a href="http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/</a> (Watch the video. It's priceless)<p>Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries.<p>So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.

strong move - shot across the bow at Bing/Farecast. I wonder where we'll start seeing integrations.

&#62; Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online.<p><i>FEWER THAN HALF?</i> Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?

Some funded sbcl work would be good.

Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future assuming Google will take this to a whole new level.<p>I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz

Dan Weinreb has made some comments on the acquisition, the future of Lisp at ITA/Google, etc.: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299</a>

Antitrust?

<i>gigantic</i> move in the travel industry<p>ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement.<p>(I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)