Farecast
From Jo:
cool idea, though the website currently is in beta and only shows data from boston and seattle
Airfares made easy:
You squeeze into your seat in the airliner, buckle up and then, against your best judgment, you start asking your seat mates what they paid for their airfare.
That's what Oren Etzioni did on a flight in 2002 and he discovered that, of course, others paid less for their tickets. Even worse, said Mr. Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, "they bought later than I 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.
A brief student project proved that, indeed, computers could be far more reliable than a Magic 8-Ball. So Mr. Etzioni helped to create 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).
...
Farecast could become a great tool for consumers because it uses much the same techniques that airline computers have used to extract the maximum amount of money from the flying public. It is the latest Web site to harness cheap computing power to hazard predictions on all sorts of everyday things and make the data available to consumers.
cool idea, though the website currently is in beta and only shows data from boston and seattle
Airfares made easy:
You squeeze into your seat in the airliner, buckle up and then, against your best judgment, you start asking your seat mates what they paid for their airfare.
That's what Oren Etzioni did on a flight in 2002 and he discovered that, of course, others paid less for their tickets. Even worse, said Mr. Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, "they bought later than I 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.
A brief student project proved that, indeed, computers could be far more reliable than a Magic 8-Ball. So Mr. Etzioni helped to create 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).
...
Farecast could become a great tool for consumers because it uses much the same techniques that airline computers have used to extract the maximum amount of money from the flying public. It is the latest Web site to harness cheap computing power to hazard predictions on all sorts of everyday things and make the data available to consumers.
