[LN-MOW]

Men vet egentlig Google hva de har gitt seg inn på? Er dette en hastverksbeslutning for å møte Bing's dominans på dette feltet? Uansett - de skal få svette før alt er i boks ...

When will the U.S. government eventually decide to confront Google?

That's really the only question that needs to be debated in the wake of Google's announcement that it plans to acquire ITA Software, the leading provider of flight information from airlines to travel Web sites, for $700 million in cash. As it stands, the deal would marry the world's leading Internet search company with a crucial link in the online flight reservation process, making life for executives at online travel sites such as Orbitz, Kayak, and Expedia a whole lot more complicated.
ITA Software's products power the reservations systems at travel sites and airlines such as Alaska Airlines

As usual, this acquisition is a case of Google seeing a search problem that its current strategy and talent can't answer. As any traveler knows, buying an airline ticket these days is both an art and a science: one of my dad's favorite jokes is, "Want to start a fight on an airplane? Ask the guy next to you what he paid for his ticket."

Google wants to use ITA's technology to create some sort of interface that makes it easier for people to search for flights on Google, where they are already searching for a lot of travel-related information, according to Google's Marissa Mayer. You can't really enter all the factors that go into a search for airline tickets--dates, times, destinations--into the Google query box, she said on a conference call following Google's announcement of the deal.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20009502-265.html