It’s official: Google has signed agreed to a deal where it will acquire ITA, a Cambridge, Massachusetts -based airline travel reservations software company.
According to Google‘s blog, Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, has noted that as a result of almost half of travel tickets being sold online today, and with flight search rapidly evolving, more room for innovation is present. Google already has proven their capacity in organizing hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, books, papers, and geographic data. It has alregady revolutionized the online video industry after acquiring YouTube in 2006 for for 1.65 Billion dollars. This purchase of ITA and ITA’s QPX management system is another step in Google‘s tireless effort in virtually controlling the web.

On one hand, this acquisition only mean a better search experience for potential flight travelers, and in an industry where almost half of the travel tickets are purchased online by websites like Expedia, the amount of internet ticket buyers is expected to rise, with more people turning away from travel agencies. This especially is the case today when there are now more internet-savvy people than there was five, ten years ago. On the other hand, this can translate to more and more travel agencies closing down.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 5:53 pm and is filed under News, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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