Google has started incorporating airline flight schedules in its search results.

Published: 30 May 2011

Google has started incorporating airline flight schedules in its search results.

“With the close of our ITA acquisition last month, we’re eager to begin developing new flight search tools to make it easier for you to plan a trip. While this flight schedule feature does not currently use ITA’s search technology, this is just a small step towards making richer travel information easier to find, and we hope to make finding flights online feel so easy,” Petter Wedum, Software Engineer, Google, wrote on a company blog.

Explaining how users can see the flight schedule on a route, Wedum wrote if you have a particular destination in mind, you can now quickly find out which airlines serve that specific route and when they fly.

For example, if you search for [flights from San Francisco to Minneapolis], you’ll see a selection of non-stop flights and the airlines that offer them. To see a full timetable, one has to click on “Schedule of non-stop flights.”

One can also see all the destinations with non-stop flights from a particular airport.

“If you’re in Buffalo, New York and need ideas for a weekend getaway, search for [flights from buffalo] to see popular travel destinations from Buffalo. By clicking “Show all non-stop routes”, you can get the full list of destinations and from there, you can click to get more flight details,” wrote Wedum.

This is currently available in 10 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Catalan.

Competition for travel meta-search

Last month Google entered into a consent decree agreeing to conditions on Google’s acquisition of ITA, and Google subsequently completed its acquisition of ITA.

Travel meta-search engines have acknowledged the emerging threat from general search engines. For example, if Google chooses to provide comprehensive travel search results such as flight and hotel pricing and availability, and further chooses to integrate such offerings with other Google services such as Google maps and weather information, then the number of users that visit travel meta-search websites and their ability to attract advertising dollars could be negatively impacted.

According to Experian Hitwise, in September 2010, approximately 30 percent of traffic to travel-related websites began with Google.

Kayak says it uses Internet search engines, principally through the purchase of travel-related keywords, to generate traffic to its websites.

Approximately five percent of its user queries during the three months ended March 31, 2011 resulted from searches initially entered on general search engine websites. Search engines, such as Google, frequently update and change the logic which determines the placement and ordering of results of a user’s search, which may reduce the effectiveness of the keywords purchased, according to Kayak.

“If a major search engine, such as Google, changes its algorithms in a manner that negatively affects the search engine ranking of our websites, or changes its pricing, operating or competitive dynamics to our disadvantage, our business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected,” stated Kayak in the new version of its S-1, with updated financials.