I’m going to London next week, so I was looking for a flight using Google and noticed a nice feature provided by the search engine.
It seems like Google recognizes your intention if you are typing something such as “paris london” which is obviously the query of someone who needs to travel, and displays a link that allows you to find a flight with different companies.
So with my query “paris london” in Google, the first result is a personalized feature that allows me to look for a flight directly from Google. What I have to do is enter the departing and returning dates. Then, I can choose amongst 5 reservation companies such as Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity etc.
After one click, I’m all set and just need to choose my flight. I’m just wondering how this function works, I’ve never heard about that before.
However, if I use Google.fr, Google displays a link that allows me to see the next train departures with SNCF, the french train company.
By the way, I recommend you to read the last post at SEO by the SEA, where Bill Slawsky tries to explain how vertical search works in Google.
Thanks for the link, Nadir. 🙂
That is a nice intuitive leap they took with the flight result. I tried a variation to see if they would recognize a town in Texas instead of showing a result like that, with a search for Paris Texas. They guessed right, and offered me a map of this Texas town.
A few other double city name results (boston london and new york london) also show a booking feature.
Nice observation about the Google France result, too.
Yeah, good thing you tried that: they are actually pretty right in spotting what you’re looking for. Personalized search ain’t that bad 🙂
Another popular city-to-city train route is Newark, New Jersey to New York City. So, I tried a newark New York search. Instead of train information, they provided the plane booking interface. It’s unlikely that many people will use that one. Oh well.
Weird, maybe because more people in the US in general are using the plane. I guess that Google.com is always showing flight links and not train.
In Google.fr, if you do “paris new york”, you don’t get a booking feature…, however if you do “paris marseille” (2 major french towns), you get a booking feature but for train: indeed in France, people use mainly the train for internal travels: interesting…