Travel Gets Geekier with Google’s New Flight Search

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Google launched its very own flight search and wants to completely dominate your life. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, now this? I’m kidding. Well… sort of.

Google’s flight search is set up with some pretty basic parameters: You can input your origin, destination, price, duration and tweak a bunch of filters for other things like stops, airlines and connections. There also seems to be an option to do an open-ended search by setting just a few criteria like price and date, similar to Kayak Explore. Results appear on the same page, making it rather functional and user-friendly.

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It’s fairly simple, but it’s still missing a few bells and whistles. For example, if you’re set on a one-way, multi-city trip or looking at an international destination, forget it (there goes my round-the-world trip).

If you remember way back last year, when Google decided to purchase ITA for $700 million, Google’s flight search will make a whole lot of sense. The company, if you’re unfamiliar, creates travel software that powers some of the biggest flight search sites around including Kayak, Orbitz, Hotwire and TripAdvisor. It probably can’t compete with the likes of the big boys yet given its limitations, but it does look promising if Google can kick it up a notch.

[via Search Engine Land]

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Erica Ho is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @ericamho and Google+. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.