Bing Partners with Kayak, Google’s Challenge Takes Flight
Microsoft search engine Bing announced a partnership with Kayak.com, a travel comparison site, to deliver accurate and reliable flights results in the United States. The move follows a string of Bing improvements pushed through these past few weeks. Microsoft was formerly using data from Farecast, an online travel search engine the tech giant acquired back in 2008. Aside from obtaining the best prices, the team-up it’s also predicting the future prices of airfares.
“Teaming up with KAYAK, a leading innovator in travel search, allows us to provide a more comprehensive travel search experience. In the coming weeks KAYAK will provide flight search results in the U.S. from multiple cities, airports and airlines, giving customers access to a larger set of flight itineraries as they work to plan and book travel on Bing,” said Krista Pappas, Director of Bing’s Global Travel Industry, in a blog.
The travel results were assimilated into the search bar so a menu just drops down to display the best prices. The data will soon be amassed by Kayak, which is getting ready for an IPO (amongst others these past few weeks). Despite the partnership with Kayak, Microsoft is not entirely abandoning Farecast for its technology will still continue giving people momentum on buying airfares.
“For Bing, this means we can focus our development resources on delivering even more unique and valuable features for customers. In essence, this lets us do more for our customers as we continue to invest in next-generation travel experiences.” Pappas added.
Aside from Kayak, Microsoft’s also partnering with many other information providers for different ends of its decision-making search tools. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram, Alpha and just yesterday, Dealmap! Microsoft’s also decided to take Bing’s location-based offering to the PC and mobile worlds. This move is partially because Bing is competing with Google, which is acquiring ITA, a flight search database that ALL major travel search engines use. Kayak and Microsoft are in a coalition together that’s fighting Google’s acquisition of ITA.
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