iXiGO, a travel meta search engine has launched a new flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter that utilizes natural language processing. According to an article by Anupam Saxena, “Users can directly post a query on iXiGO’s Facebook page or make a twitter mention to @iXiGOsearch with the query. iXiGO says that it will reply to the user with a comment on his query with details of the cheapest flight found across multiple travel sites, a link to the relevant iXiGO.com result page where the user can filter the results by time, stops, price and other factors, as well as a direct booking link for booking the cheapest flight on the travel site where it is available.”

Saxena reports, “We tried using the service for searching flights on both Twitter and Facebook and found that the Search engine works well. The results were swift and accurate, however, the Twitter response only included the link to ‘all Search results’. This might be because of the character limitation. Semantic search through social networks eliminates the need for filling up forms on a search engine or on different OTAs. This will make OTA flight search redundant, and might as well affect traffic, since users would look out for the cheapest deal and directly head to the OTA offering it.”

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Image: Courtesy iXiGO