Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a business class flight, but want to save some money.
Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form one European airport to another.
Google flights will let you search for the best combination of flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports, and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports in multiple countries.
So, you could search for a flight that originates in some combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any other 6 large European airports).
Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length (say, 14-days) over an entire month.
Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.
In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400 individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives me in a single screen.
It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.
There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but Google Flights is amazing.
Also, it looks like the Matrix might go extinct soon:
> This interface runs on a deprecated web platform. At some point in the near future, we will be forced to shut it down. We unfortunately do not have a timeline on when this will happen. We welcome feedback about features missing from the new interface, we read all feedback and open bugs accordingly.
2. I don't use it, I point out for others facts about service OP recommends so they don't waste their time or you prefer everyone wasting their time?
[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ita-software-acquisi...
The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies. Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.
We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore).
On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.