Airfares made easy (or easier)

Iria · Jul 2, 2006, 03:21 PM

Source: News.com
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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 Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, "they bought later than I did."

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.

Jul 2, 2006, 03:21 PM	#1
Iria DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 7,275 Rep Power: 87	Airfares made easy (or easier) Source: News.com ________ 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 Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, "they bought later than I did." 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.