I’ve noticed that almost every single airline website feels extremely clunky, simply searching for a single flight route can take a minute to load. However, Google Flights only takes a few seconds and searches across all airlines.
In theory, shouldn’t it take longer for Google to process the information if they need to pull data from so many different airlines?
In: 21
The short answer is because Google is much better at designing websites
They pre-cache and rescan websites for updates so that they can present you faster outputs from their database and can compute better and cheaper routes for you.
Airline websites are notorious for being made on the cheap and are designed and maintained by teams that don’t have anywhere near the resources that Google has.
Also the backend booking system for most airlines is Saber which is ancient and slow and many airlines (Southwest is a prime example) are notorious for refusing to spend any money to update their systems.
In my experience most airline IT systems have been built by lowest cost outsourced IT, and they are layered on top of each other over the years. Every layer adds time and complexity, slowing down results.
Searching for flights is computationally expensive and has to query and process a huge amount of data. Google are experts at this end spend billions to build efficient systems that make this as efficient as possible.
Searches are actually quite slow. Google doesn’t really care if it’s data is wrong, so it can do a search every 6 hours and just spit back the same information each time.
If your the airline and you raised prices on a flight 30 seconds ago you don’t want your website presenting the old cost,, so you have to do the search each time.
Airline websites may take extra time because they need to obtain metadata from external sources to recalculate prices specific for you.
(E.g. airline website has to check your web browser for cookies to see if you’ve searched for the same flight recently and now pretend it’s selling out and/or show you a higher price)
There is some “fake loading” programed into some pricing related websites (hotels, flights, cars, insurance, etc.) because it tricks (some) people into thinking that it’s “calculating” best price or whatever else.
1. Google will cache the data for it, but this means it may be out of date.
2. The airline’s websites often have a built in delay so you can’t browse it at full speed. This is partially to help with excessive website traffic, but also to make it harder to compare many flights at the same time.
The problem is live data. Google doesn’t work with live data, it works with cached data. The difference is like going to the library, and possibly multiple libraries, to look for the data co pared to just remembering it. Sure, there might be newer data in the library, but you’d have to go all the way over there to get it, so you’re better off just using memory. If you want to actually buy one of those tickets, though, you actually need the live data, to make sure there’s a seat left to buy, but by that time you have left Google and gone to the airline website. So Google gets to shine, and the airline websites get to take all the shit.
This, coincidentally, is how nomal search engines work too.
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