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Google’s Acquisition Of ITA Makes Little Sense


By Daya Baran at July 02, 2010 1 Comments    Share

Google has acquired ITA Software which provides flight pricing and information to travel agencies and travel websites. You have probably heard of Sabre which does the same thing and there are many such companies that provide information to agencies, flight terminals and websites.

Meta search engines like Bing, Kayak, Hotwire, Priceline aggregate this information from the Sabre, ITA, online travel agencies like Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and travel websites Delta.com and others, and present it on their website.

I am not sure what Google hopes to do differently than what Bing, Kayak and others are already doing. If they do it will only be incremental or make little difference if any at all. This reminds me of the acquisition of dMarc, a radio broadcasting and advertising company, which Google paid close to $1 billion in earn-outs and it bombed badly. Google ended up selling the company back to the founders a year later for pennies.

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  1. What Google hopes to do is relate one's activity on ITA to one's keyword searches on Google to present more relevant results (through cookies probably). All things at Google are meant to feed the giant cash-cow that is Keyword-Search (AdWords).

    Comment by Ravi Chivukula — July 3, 2010 @ 3:52 PM

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