Google Launches Flight Search Service

Google, after a five month long wait due to antitrust lawsuit, has finally launched its Flight Search service to the users searching for travel information. The air travel technology that is powering Google’s flight search service is provided by ITA Software.

This flight search allows the users to find and book air travel using the search engine itself. You can find it as an option in the left-hand column of the search results page sidebar. Well, it isn’t released for worldwide travels yet so we can call this as a beta version allowing users to search only for flights within the US as locations outside are not supported yet. You can start viewing and booking your desired flights here now at www.google.com/flights .

Why would users like this service more than the others ?

 Its clean and the user interface is awesome.

 Super fast and produces your desired results in seconds

 Gives you lots of options to choose from.

 The ‘Specific Time’ Slider allows to filter the results according to your desired departure and arrival time.

 Either select a non-stop flight, 1 stop or 2 stop flight. This feature would work better with international flights.

 And yet again, its super fast.

Google does make sure what ever new service it comes up with is fast. According to Google’s Kourosh Gharachorloo, Engineering Director,  “Speed is critical to all the things we love on the web, and travel planning should be no exception.” 

Other travel services such as Expedia, Orbitz, Bing Travel etc now have a great competitor added to their niche. From Google’s success, they sure are worried because most of the people who used to search for booking flights in Google used to end up in other travel services like the ones listed above. As time goes by, users would get the results from Google’s Flight Search Service and this would cause a drastic reduction of users going to other travel websites.

Now when you have everything you begin to abuse it and therefore to ensure Google isn’t doing such, the Justice Department announced that the data that are collected from the ITA customers should be totally isolated from other data in Google. Moreover it would establish a complaint mechanism as a way to monitor the behaviour of Google towards other travel industry competitors.

Well, we the users got what we need. Fast loading results for a plane to our desired destination.

Enjoy!