Excerpt from a speech Eric Schmidt of Google made on flight search:
“You often hear people talk about search as a solved problem. But we are nowhere near close. Try a query like “show me flights under €300 for places where it’s hot in December and I can snorkel”.
“That’s kind of complicated: Google needs to know about flights under €300; hot destinations in winter; and what places are near the water, with cool fish to see. That’s basically three separate searches that have to be cross-referenced to get to the right answer.
“Sadly, we can’t solve that for you today. But we’re working on it. Flight search is a small step in the right direction. For years Google wasn’t very good at answering queries like “flights from Berlin to London.” We showed a bunch of links to other sites, where users then had to enter their query over again. And we noticed lots of repeat searches, a sure sign of user frustration. People wanted direct answers, with fewer clicks.
“So we created Flight Search — and now you can quickly compare prices and times from different airlines right from the results page. This issue of providing direct answers to questions is at the heart of complaints being made about Google to the European Commission.
“Companies like Expedia, Yelp, and TripAdvisor argue that it deprives their websites of valuable traffic and disadvantages their businesses. They’d rather go back to 10 blue links. What’s interesting is that the traffic these websites get from Google has increased significantly — faster in fact than our own traffic — since we started showing direct answers to questions.
“That said, the amount of traffic going to other services should not be the main yardstick of success for Google because the goal of a search engine is to deliver relevant results to users as quickly as possible. Put simply, we created search for users, not websites. And that’s the motivation behind all our improvements over the last decade.”
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