Google Buys Travel Search Engine ITA for $700 Million in Cash

Google makes new acquisitions faster than most people change socks, but the latest one is a bit bigger than what it usually dabbles with. The search company has acquired ITA an online flight search technology provider which serves some big names in the web travel industry. Google hasn’t competed in the lucrative travel search business so far, but most people believed it was only a matter of time until the company would enter this market.

“While online flight search is rapidly evolving, we think there is room for more competition and greater innovation. Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search and User Experience, wrote.

“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,” she detailed Google’s future plans.

Google acquired ITA for $700 million in cash making it one its biggest deals of the year, along with AdMob which it bought for $750 million. ITA was founded in 1996 by computer scientists from MIT and has raised $100 million in a funding round in 2006. It provides travel search technologies to a number of big-name clients including Bing Travel, one of Microsoft’s success stories, and Kayak.

Online travel search has proven very lucrative for the companies currently providing these services. So much so that Google’s absence from the market was odd to say the least. While the search giant entered or created new markets constantly, travel has remained untouched. This is now about to change as Google plans to build its own travel search engine based on ITA technology.

The company is providing several ‘facts’ about the acquisition in the hopes of getting the approval from the regulators faster. Google waited several months for the AdMob deal to be approved. The fact that it’s not currently competing in the market or with ITA may help streamline the process.