Bing Puts Flight Prices Right in the Search Box

Bing has introduced flight prices in auto-suggestions. You can simply enter your query, and it will bring up a prediction for what Bing Travel deems the best flight price deal within the next 90 days.

"Bing travel crunches over a billion airfares on a daily basis to bring you Price Predictors, and we use that data to uncover cheap airline tickets every day," explains Bing’s David Lindheimer on the Bing Search blog. "With Autosuggest Flight Prices natural language capabilities, you can simply type ‘Fly to Chicago’ or ‘Chicago Flights’ and Bing will immediately recognize where you are, in this case Seattle, and instantaneously display the Price Predictor based on your location."

"Don’t worry about entering the formal city name or airport name," adds Lindheimer. "Bing Travel recognizes colloquial names like Chi Town."

The feauture must still be rolling out, because it’s not working for me yet.

Meanwhile, Google is reportedly negotiating with the Department of Justice to prevent having to go to court over its acquisition of travel software service ITA Software (hat tip: Greg Sterling). Bing is a member of the FairSearch Coalition, whose sole purpose is to see that this acquisition is blocked.

Google has been criticized for favoring its own content over competitors. It’s interesting that Bing is going so far as to suggest its own content before users even get to the search results themselves.

There are 2 Comments. Add Yours.

modelportfolio2003
February 26, 2011 at 3:31 am

I believe this is clearest sign yet that the Google ITA deal will be approved because Microsoft complaining and launching this pre-empitve travel search bar would look crazy if it thought it had successfully blocked Google’s acquisition on the grounds Google was favoring its own result.
- Joe
  February 26, 2011 at 2:24 pm
  
  Microsoft isn’t at the same level as Google. MS doesn’t command the majority of searches. They can implement whatever they are accusing google of doing and try at the same time to block the purchase. In other words, they can be hypocrites all the want and it doesn’t matter as they are nothing. They can do that as well as Yahoo and other search engines and it is just fine. Nobody uses those engines. Google is in a different pedestal commanding the majority of searches, so this will not influence in the least the approval or not of the ITA deal.