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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! I wonder why ITA never offered a search engine themselves, if they had all the data aggregated. And boy do I love dealing with invalid CSVs... (especially ones that contain commas within the fields by accident)

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They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com

Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I’m surprised that Google didn’t axe it in favor of Google Flights.

I suspect that branding is powerful, so it's better to keep an existing flight search running than to axe it in favor of something else and loose all the existing customers. Google bought ITA and kept matrix.itasoftware.com running with (presumably) the same branding; Booking Holdings bought Kayak and kept kayak.com running with the same branding.

The title of the site is "Matrix - ITA Software by Google". Also, on the site, they link themselves:

  Want to explore flights and get fast results?
  Try Google Flights

Almost seems like a deprecation notice...

There are some feature in matrix that flights didn't pick up. The original matrix site was even more powerful and exposed some operator-ishness, depending on what kind of account you were granted.

I want it noted that this thing is really neat — you can provide parameters like min layover of 2 hrs, or 2 weeks, and even search only within a particular airline alliance

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