Oh happy day for ITA Software, which has agreed to be acquired by Google for the nice sum of around $700 million.
Only in America.
But we digress. ITA Software and its happy day are the focus here. ITA makes airline flight-information and fare-search software, and it has an impressive list of clients: its QPX search engine sits behind the fare searches of airlines and of travel sites such as Orbitz, Kayak and Microsoft's Bing travel search.
Google plans to push ahead with its efforts to give web searchers the best possible resource for finding information about flights. Kudos to ITA Software for a further step into epic status.
What happened next
Editor's note, 2026: the deal was not finished overnight. US competition regulators reviewed it for months, and it only closed in April 2011, with conditions that required Google to keep licensing ITA's software to rival travel sites. ITA's technology then became the engine of Google Flights, which launched later in 2011 and is still how a lot of people start a trip.
