Google Launches Super-Fast Flight Searching Site

Google tends to launch more projects than I can keep track of, and despite their volume, it’s a rare day when one of them strikes me as being amazing. Google Flights finds itself under that exact description, because after a couple of quick tests, I could see me using this as my primary source of flight-booking in the future.

If you’ve ever booked a flight on any service at all, you are probably all too aware of the waiting that’s forced upon us. In fact, it can take literally hours in some cases to book a flight if you are looking for the best deal, seeing as each query may take up to a minute to process, and a lot of tweaking to the options needs to be done.

That’s where Google’s acquisition of ITA Software earlier this year for a staggering $700 million comes into play. ITA specialized in flight searches, and with the results seen at Google today, we can see why the company was so anxious to snap ITA up. On one hand, Google Instant can give us our search results fast, so why not our flight searches?

With Google’s service, that’s the goal. After typing in an airport code or city in the local location and destination fields, you’ll be presented with search results immediately. The results are given in the form of a list, while at the same time the map above shows other destinations that can be traveled to, and their prices.

The best part of this service, to me, is that it makes finding best rate a simple affair. If you have a little bit of freedom with your dates, you can simply use the < and > arrows around the dates to incrementally change the flight by one day at a time, and on each click, the prices below are updated almost immediately. Given that I usually wait about about 20 seconds or more when entering a new date at the usual travel sites I go to, this is without question, impressive.

One thing I would like to see, though, is the map show the the connecting flights for all of the results listed. This way, you could easily get a grasp on your flight path, and make changes if need be.

Well done, Google. Now please open it up international destinations!