Live Search Farecast

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Live Search Farecast

Live Search Farecast (previously Farecast.com) is the first airfare prediction website in the computer reservations system industry. Farecast premiered to the public in May 2006, and went through a year of beta testing before emerging from beta on May 15th, 2007. Within the travel industry, Farecast is the only website to offer predictions on when is the best time to purchase airline tickets ^[1].

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History

The company was Founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni (founder of MetaCrawler and a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington), and has collected over 175 billion airfare observations^[2] to date. Farecast's team of data miners use these airfare observations to build algorithms to predict future airfare price movements.

In August 2007 Farecast launched a beta version of its hotel search engine with an innovative "deals" rate key. In May 2007 the company released results of an independent audit verifying Farecast's prediction accuracy at 74.5 percent and also launched additional features such as Farecast Alerts (a notification service that will inform travelers of key price drops) and a flight quality filter that allows travelers to sort flights by type. In February 2007 Farecast introduced Fare Guard^[3], which allows customers to lock-in a specific price for a flight and be protected from future price increases for the following seven days.

In April 2008, Farecast was bought by Microsoft for a fee believed to be around $75 million to 115 million ^[4]. Microsoft officially integrated it as part of its Live Search group of tools in May 2008.