An early look at our Flight Search feature

Just over five months ago, we welcomed ITA Software to the Google family. Since then, our engineering teams have been working closely together to build new travel tools that provide faster, more flexible, and more useful results to online travel searches. We wanted to give you an early look at some of what we’ve been able to accomplish so far.

Starting today, when you search for flight information on Google, for example “flights from Chicago to Denver,” you will see a “Flights” link in the left-hand panel. This link leads to our new Flight Search feature, and is offered in addition to the flight schedules which have been available since May. You can also access the Flight Search feature directly at google.com/flights.

With this first step in flight search that combines ITA’s expertise with Google’s technology, you will be able to:

• Get super-fast results. Speed is critical to all the things we love on the web, and travel planning should be no exception. Making changes to dates, destinations, and filters should be as fast as we hope you’ve come to expect from Google. 

• See a simple list of the most relevant flights. Flight Search shows you an easy-to-scan list to help you get to your destination quickly and inexpensively. 

• Figure out when to travel. Quickly see which travel dates are least expensive by dragging the date selector forward or backward, or check out the bar chart to compare lots of dates at once. 

• Consider your destination options. Flight Search helps you explore possible destinations, letting you filter them by airline, flight time and price. For example, you can use the map and filters to see where you can go from San Francisco within 3 hours for less than $300. 

Flights are chosen primarily based on cost and total travel time, while covering a variety of departure times and airlines. We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.

The selection of flight results is not influenced by any paid relationships. Airlines control how their flights are marketed, so as with other flight search providers, our booking links point to airline websites only. We're working to create additional opportunities for our other partners in the travel industry to participate as well.

This is just an early look: the takeoff, not the final destination! You may notice that at the moment we include a limited number of U.S. cities and show results for round-trip economy-class flights only. We’re working hard to improve this feature and look forward to sharing more updates.

Don’t worry if you don’t see the Flight Search feature -- we’re rolling it out over the course of the day. To learn more, check out this video:

 

Posted by Kourosh Gharachorloo, Engineering Director