I’ve used a number of those others, and at least via my personal scoring system, google flights is still by far the number one. Your link prioritizes very different things than I do, for example one of its top scoring sites has as a con that you can’t filter out 10+ hour layovers).

"We also ignored any itinerary that would be hell to fly-basically anything increasing total travel time by more than half through excessively long layovers, too many stops, or flying way out of your way just to change planes. Airlines may think that makes for a viable plan, but we don't."

Am I reading this wrong or does this indicate Frommer also prioritises avoiding long layovers.

(I dislike the inclusion of the long layover options too but I have always thought the reason the sites include them is that they actually sell. I once met someone who took these long layover flights on popular routes that always have many shorter options, so I know such people exist.)

If nothing else they need to exist due to rare destinations with few planes going to them, together with having to fly to those airports.

Occasionally I am actually looking for the longest possible layover. Having a couple of days in another city along the route can actually be pretty cool - you get 2 holidays for the price of one, or a free holiday on the side of a work trip.

Another example is people doing mileage runs (see FlyerTalk).

>” The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running".”

The thing is, it’s the index they built with the technology they built. Google is not the only index. To build a public index, you’d need to have public crawlers, which would bring a whole boatload more questions / regulation / debate. Google’s search ranking is part of the secret sauce that they try very hard to obscure, while hinting at how to be good at it; basically: provide something valuable to visitors, and you’ll rank highly, at least in theory. Get caught cheating and get blacklisted.

Flight info is already public. Ticket prices are not, and vary tons based on all the deals and schemes out there. That’s not Google’s fault, but the fault (if one views it that way) of the airlines playing pricing games. Their business model relies on getting everyone to pay the highest price per seat they can get from a customer, so they benefit from not being open about pricing. Their goal is also to fill flights with paying customers or paying cargo, or the most profitable mix, depending on many factors. Again, not Google’s fault.

Google is in a position to front-run results and provide an experience that other companies cannot by virtue of users already being on their site using their search. It doesn’t seem reasonable to compare Google to a travel site, as it’s pretty clear that one wouldn’t expect e.g. Expedia to list Travelocity results alongside their own with equal priority.

I’m usually really against monopolistic behavior, as many companies use it to screw users and maximize profits (e.g. Comcast). Google isn’t in the same league IMO because they behave a lot more charitably — if it were Comcast running Google, I would wholly expect them to completely de-list every competing travel site and work on lobbying the government to get those competitors shut down, while channeling tax dollars paid to build infrastructure into their own pockets.

It’s a dumb lawsuit that will go nowhere. The lawsuit is disingenuous as they know it will fail. The true purpose is political lip service — accomplish nothing while claiming to be doing something against a perceived enemy.

Google flight search does just as good as Skiplagged for the routes I tend to fly and the UI makes it easier to find the cheapest dates.

If I am doing complicated international stuff I will check multiple locations for prices but for my simple domestic routes the ease and speed of google flights makes it the best option.

Edit: That said, I don't use google as my default search engine as I switched all my devices to DDG a long time ago.

Users can check, Bing, Common Crawl, or even the other 9 links on the first page of Google Search for more search results, no?