Latest Google Gizmo: Flight Search

Please see UPDATE and UPDATE! below, about Bing.

You may have seen this already, but in case you haven't in the few days the feature has been available...

In a Google search box, enter "Flight" followed by the airport abbreviations for any two cities connected by nonstop flights. You could do "Flight JFK LAX" or "Flight DFW MIA," but let's try it with a search for flights between Chicago O'Hare and Dubuque. Here is what you would see after entering "Flight ORD DBQ":

Notice the little airplane symbol at the top of the search results. If you then click on the plus sign below it, next to "schedule of non-stop flights," here is what you would get:

If you did the same thing for a more heavily trafficked route, you'd get a long list of flights, times, frequencies, and airlines. Give it a try, for instance, with LGA ORD. In its stripped-down effectiveness in answering the question, "what's are my choices for getting to Dubuque," I can see the handiness of this relative to Kayak or some other services.

For another time, what features like this suggest about Google's attempt to expand its reach from (less profitable) pure search functions to (more profitable) e-commerce of various sorts. For now, a handy feature. Thanks to Parker Donham for the lead.
____
Update: several readers, including at least one who works at Microsoft, have written to ask, "But what about Bing?" Bing has indeed long had its own flight search feature, which differs from the new Google one in an instructive way.

If you typed "Flight ORD DBQ" into the Bing search box, and as with Google clicked on the first "Flights from Chicago to Dubuque" link at the top of the results, you'd see a screen like this. Click for bigger.

That is, you'd get a flight-selection and flight-shopping view more or less familiar to people who use Kayak, Expedia, and similar services. You see a list of connections arranged by price; you've got sliders to change your choices of flight times, number of stops, etc; you're directly into the shopping-for-flights mode.

Compare and contrast? Google's new feature is quicker and faster if you want to see an unornamented list of who goes where, when. In that way its function is like the old OAG / Official Airline Guide. Bing's puts you straight into comparison shopping for flights, in keeping with its "decision engine" approach.  I mentioned Google's new flight-search feature because the list-of-connections aspect was more novel to me than the comparison shopping that Bing offers. But each has its virtues, so mix and match as appropriate.
___
Bonus Update! A friend writes:

>>No doubt I'm going to be one of a crowd saying this, but you left out the major distinguishing strength of Bing's flight-search capabilities--in fact, it's the only reason I ever use Bing. In 2008, Microsoft acquired Farecast, a startup that developed algorithms to predict the chances that a flight's price is likely to increase, decrease, or stay stable over the next week. This invaluable and unmatched feature (which to me is quite mystical-seeming) is now integrated into Bing searches for round-trip flights, though for some reason it didn't kick in for the search in your screen shot. ("No Price Predictor. Learn why," it says.)

Do give it a spin, if you never have before. Make sure to click through so that you see not just the graphical arrow icon but the chance of each potential outcome expressed as a percentage.<<

Uncle! This is how we learn.