Google gets into Travel: ITA Acquisition

I use ITA software quite regularly when planning trips. However, it caught me by surprise when Google announced late last week that it was buying them. The acquisition was announced on the Google blog.

Google is trying to make travel easier. From the post:

... finding the right flight at the best price is a frustrating experience; pricing and availability change constantly, and even a simple two city itinerary involves literally thousands of different options. We’d like to make that search much easier... Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket.

Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search Updates

Google Scholar announced yesterday a new feature to allow search within a citing articles.

Microsoft has also re-released the Microsoft Academic Search from MSR Asia. The MAS search has a faceted search interface which allows filtering by author, conference, and journal. In addition, it goes beyond searching papers by providing a page for each author. This is quite useful and it has interesting visualizations to show citations over time and connections to other authors.

It's great to see improvements in this area. Scholarly research is still far too difficult and we have a long way to go in making the search tools more capable.

2010 Hadoop Summit

Yesterday was the 2010 Y! Hadoop Summit. Be sure to read Ryan Rosario's coverage. Many of presentation talks are linked from the Agenda page and via the YDN slideshare channel. I'll highlight a few presentations that caught my attention:

XXL Graph Algorithms - by Sergei Vassilvitskii Connected component analysis in large graphs

Mining Billion-node Graphs: Patterns, Generators and Tools - Jimmy Lin's presentation on experience computing PageRank on a section from the ClueWeb09 web graph.

Hopefully, the morning talks will also be made available online.