Farecast--Pay Less to Fly
Mr. Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington found that people in neighboring seats on airplanes paid less than he did and bought tickets after he did.
Mr. Etzioni, the brains behind such early Internet companies as MetaCrawler, a search engine, and Netbot, an online comparison shopping service, decided this was a situation computers could address.
All he would need is a mountain of data to mine for information about seat supply and demand and an algorithm to predict how the airlines' algorithms were going to price those seats.
The result: Farecast, an airfare search engine that also predicts how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall over the coming days (www.farecast.com).
Still in Beta, it only addresses flights from two cities now, but will continue to add destinations.
Mr. Etzioni, the brains behind such early Internet companies as MetaCrawler, a search engine, and Netbot, an online comparison shopping service, decided this was a situation computers could address.
All he would need is a mountain of data to mine for information about seat supply and demand and an algorithm to predict how the airlines' algorithms were going to price those seats.
The result: Farecast, an airfare search engine that also predicts how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall over the coming days (www.farecast.com).
Still in Beta, it only addresses flights from two cities now, but will continue to add destinations.
Comments