Google must feel very put-upon at times. It tries to help searchers find what they're looking for, and prides itself on not being evil. Lately, though, whenever it does the former, observers accuse it of doing the latter – even if some other search engine did it first. Such is the case with Google Flight Search.
Just in case you missed it, this new tool came on the scene about four months ago as the first fruit of the search giant's purchase of travel software company ITA. At the time Google acquired ITA, the US Department of Justice required it “to develop and license travel software, to establish internal firewall procedures and to continue software research and development” in order to “protect competition for airfare comparison and booking websites and ensure those websites using ITA's software will be able to power their websites to compete against any airfare website Google may introduce.” If you want to review Google's announcement of the purchase, you can see it here.
I haven't used the tool very much myself yet; for whatever reason, it doesn't work yet for the places to which I want to travel. Greg Sterling gives an excellent run down on how it works. Basically, if you put a travel-related search into Google – “flights from nyc to san francisco,” for instance – you get some extra information. A box appears below the sponsored results, but just above the actual links, that shows you some of the flights available on various airlines, along with their times and flights.
You can click on a link in this box to see more Google flight search results, or choose “Flights” from the links in the left column; they'll both take you to the same place. It's a sophisticated filter that lets you choose airports, departure and arrival dates, connections, duration of flight, number of stops, and more. When you're done, you get a list of flights that meet your criteria. In some cases, you can click on the flight and book it directly from these results.
It seems to be both the positioning and booking aspects of the filter that put Kayak and other travel-focused search engines up in arms. Danny Sullivan noted that the Wall Street Journal even ran a story on the filter, though it claimed the new travel results started appearing in December rather than in September 2011. According to Sullivan, the article only quoted Kayak as slamming Google for the move. He said that they complained that Google has an “'explicit policy to intercept general search queries with their products,' and therefore, 'their argument that they're not engaging in anticompetitive practices doesn't hold up to basic logic.'”
Should one competitor in an industry get stoned for engaging in the same practices as its rivals? As Sullivan explains – and as I'll get to in just a minute – that's exactly what's happening here. In fact, Google is being more even-handed, in a way, to travel search engines than its rival Bing. But Kayak's cozy relationship with Microsoft's search engine gives it no cause to complain about this behavior.
Google Optimization 
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