Bing and Kayak, the “travel search engine” have announced a partnership today, similar to partnerships Bing has established with Facebook, Twitter, and Wolfram Alfa. From an email to LiveSide.net promoting the new partnership:Today, Bing Travel and KAYAK announced a partnership to incorporate KAYAK travel search services within Bing Travel in the U.S, starting with flight search. Bing Travel tools, together with KAYAK’s comprehensive travel search results, will allow travelers to easily and quickly find the best airfare on the Web. What this means for Bing Travel customers is that, in the coming weeks, travelers will have access to a more comprehensive set of flight itineraries including more airlines, airports and cities; in addition to the unique travel tools Bing Travel provides such as Price Predictor, flexible search, Flights Answers and more.
The new partnership will provide Bing with expanded travel search results while allowing them to concentrate internally on “more unique and valuable features for customers.
For those of you who don’t know Kayak, here’s a little more information, provided by Crunchbase:
KAYAK maintains advertising agreements with over 4,000 travel suppliers and online travel agencies including nearly every leading airline globally, most global hotel and car rental operators, and the leading online travel agencies including Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline. The company also has several affiliate marketing partnerships. KAYAK provides ‘white label’ products within other branded web sites including America Online, Comcast, USA Today, Roadrunner, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Pricerunner, and About.com.
Kayak is built on a Java, Apache and Linux platform. It uses XML-HTTP and Javascript to create a rich UI.
Over at Kayak, they seem to be taking the partnership with an almost giddy slant on the day’s news:
We’re looking forward to benefiting from Bing’s global reach and innovation in general search. We’re already evaluating replacing our current map content with Bing maps (and we’re going around the office making sure everyone has Bing selected as the default search engine on their browsers).
Quite a turnaround for a company using Google maps and built on Java, Linux, and Apache!
(edit): Manan Kakkar, fresh from the MVP Summit (hope you had fun in Seattle!), reminds us in a comment that Kayak’s relationship with Bing didn’t start out too well. Here’s a Wired post on Kayak’s complaining to MSFT with "concerns about the similarities" of Bing to Kayak, back in June 2009. Obviously that’s water under the bridge, now