Google improves flight search, kills referral traffic to travel sites

Just type the airline and flight number into Google, and it'll tell you if the flight is on time or not.

Google has improved its search results for flight tracking. Previously, when you searched for an airline and flight number in Google (for example, AA 28), you got links to services that would tell you if your plane was on time or not. Now, you don't need the link: you get that data on the search result page.

This is a time-saver for Google users, but Travelocity, Expedia, and FBOWeb, which offer flight tracking services, will suffer since they no longer get the links. Instead, the data is provided by Conducive Technology's FlightStats. It's a decent service, but personally I prefer FBOWeb's tracker, because it creates cool links to track flights on Google Earth.

See my previous--and now obsolete--story, Map your sweetie's progress with a flight tracker.

Source: The Official Google Blog.

[FlightStats]

Rafe, FlightStats does offer a flight tracker based on Google Maps and sports several significant advantages over the tracker offered by FBOWeb including: worldwide flight coverage (FBOWeb is US only), gate times and gate assignment (FBOWeb has only runway times and positional information) plus links to on-time performance ratings, airport delay information, weather conditions and forecasts and more. As you mention in your previous review, you can also setup flight alerts to be sent to your desktop or mobile device.

[adsaero]

i tried the new google link just the other day and the data was incorrect. i was tracking a jetblue flight and it claimed that it was on time, when in fact the plane was still on the ground in newark because of weather delays... the flight, in fact, didnt depart for another several hours. at least fboweb showed it correctly

[rafe]

@Flightstats, where is the Google EARTH link?

Also, congrats on landing this deal.