Fine-Tuning Your Flight Search

Fine-Tuning Your Flight Search

By SUSAN STELLIN

LAST month, Google introduced the first version of its new flight search feature (Google.com/flights) and the response has mostly focused on what it does not offer. Right now, it can search only for round-trip tickets for select domestic destinations. And while it is much faster than other travel search engines, it does not display fares from all the airlines that serve a particular route.

Sean Carlson, a Google spokesman, said the current flight search is only an “early look” at what is in the pipeline and that more options will be added as engineers integrate technology from ITA Software, which Google bought earlier this year.

Though Google’s debut may have been premature, its foray into flight search has shaken up the competitive landscape, which is good news for travelers. One notable change is that travel search engines are finally moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach to booking a flight, and are building tools that answer specific questions about different types of trips. Here are some of the most pertinent queries that search engines are currently taking on.

WHAT IS THE TICKET PRICE, INCLUDING BAG FEES? Most search engines give you only the price of a ticket. But escalating fees for baggage, preferred seats and other extras have made some passengers wish they could see the total cost of a flight. Kayak.com has a fix — at least for the cost of checked luggage. On the left side of the fare results page, a link allows users to “Add baggage” to the fares Kayak has found.

“You can enter the number of bags you’re going to check, and we will instantly reprice all of those flights for you,” said Robert Birge, Kayak’s chief marketing officer. Although Kayak does not display fares from Southwest — which allows two free checked bags but does not share its fare data with other Web sites — this feature makes Kayak a good choice if you are going to check a bag when you fly.

IS THE TRAIN LESS EXPENSIVE? Hipmunk.com, a travel search engine that made its debut last year, automatically includes Amtrak prices and departure times when you search for flights on a route that is also served by the train. Adam Goldstein, one of Hipmunk’s founders, said that is an especially popular feature for trips between Boston, New York and Washington, but that it also appeals to people traveling on other short routes, like Chicago to Milwaukee or Seattle to Portland.

Hipmunk even highlights which trains have Wi-Fi, and its bar graph interface makes it easy to compare travel times and prices: the time bar stretches from the departure time to the arrival time for each flight and train. Hipmunk is known for taking a more visual approach to presenting information (rather than showing a long list of flights), but other travel sites, including Google, are experimenting with maps and graphs as well.

WHEN IS THE CHEAPEST TIME TO TRAVEL? Most travel Web sites now allow users to search for fares on dates close to the ones you initially input, so you can potentially save money by shifting your itinerary by a day or two. But for some trips — like a weekend visit with a friend — you may want to be even more flexible, looking for the cheapest time to travel in the next month or more.

My favorite site for this type of search is ITA Software’s Matrix search tool, which lets you select an option called “See calendar of lowest fares.” Once you enter the earliest date you can travel and the number of nights you want to stay, a calendar shows the lowest price for each departure date in the next month.

One drawback of using ITA Software is that it does not sell tickets; you have to recreate your itinerary and buy it through the airline or another site. But Google offers a similar feature if you click the not-so-obvious calendar icon after you enter your itinerary (it’s a gray square below the route map). Say you entered a three-night itinerary — a bar graph appears showing the price of a three-night trip for each departure date in the next six months. As you scroll down through each date, your trip is also highlighted on a calendar, so you can easily scan the cheapest Friday departures.

Although Kayak and other sites also offer versions of the flexible search option, Google’s calendar stretches out farther, its results are quicker, and its interface is better. Once Google’s flight selection is more comprehensive, its flexible search will be tough to beat.

WHERE CAN I GO WITHIN MY BUDGET? One area travel sites have been slow to address is what Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group, calls the dream phase of vacation planning.

“Not everybody knows where they want to go when they start thinking about a trip,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “I think this is where the future of flight search is going to be.”

He pointed to Kayak’s explore feature (kayak.com/explore) as a model; it lets you enter your departure city, travel season, budget and maximum flight time and then displays a map showing where you can go within those parameters. Although the airfares displayed above each city are subject to change after you choose a travel date, this feature is a good way to discover destinations you might not have considered, like comparing various islands in the Caribbean.

Google also has a version of this feature; a route map is displayed when you search for flights, showing prices for major cities and adding other destinations as you zoom in. But Google’s current flight data limitations make that feature less useful for now.

WHEN’S THE BEST TIME TO BOOK? Microsoft’s Bing flight tool (travel.bing.com) does the best job of helping travelers decide when to book by presenting a “buy now” or “wait” recommendation above the results when you search for a flight. Although those predictions can be hit or miss, Bing’s “fare history” link shows the average low and the recent price history for the route you entered, so you can gauge whether you are getting a reasonable fare. That is especially useful if you are flying somewhere new and have no idea what a ticket should cost. Kayak offers a similar option (“Show fare charts”) in the left margin of its search results, but its link is easy to overlook — a design challenge as sites add new tools.

“There’s a really tough balance here in terms of how much information to present,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “But you have to make it easy for customers to discover what they want.”

Fine-Tuning Your Flight Search - NYTimes.com

AutoCorrect Gmail Typos in Chrome

UPDATE: Newest version lets you define your own corrections.

AutoCorrect Typos In GMail When Composing Emails [Chrome]

As a word processor, one of the greatest things about MS Word is that it fixes your typos and grammar automatically, as a browser, the great thing about Chrome is spell check (Internet Explorer 10 might have an edge over it though) and of course, Gmail too saves you from coming off as a bad speller. The point is, all these spell checking and grammar correcting features save our skin, they’ve been covering our hides so long we’ve become bad spellers and we love them for it. So, Gmail is naturally great because it tells you when you’ve misspelled a word but what it doesn’t do is auto correct your typos. ezAutoCorrect for GMail is a Chrome extension that auto corrects select typos as you type in Gmail.

To get a better sense of how this extension works, open MS word, type teh (typo for The) and press the spacebar, it is automatically corrected to The. Now imagine this happening in Gmail, that’s what this extension does. It runs quietly and unobtrusively in the background and fixes those little mistakes you make as you type. As opposed to having to right-click a misspelled word and choosing the right one from the context menu, this extension will automatically correct the words when you hit the space bar.

The list of typos (which aren’t listed anywhere) are, for now, hard coded (i.e., you get what you get). It corrects words like teh to The, yuo to You, dont to Don’t and i to I. The slight short coming with the extension is that you can’t add your own customized corrections. The developer has promised to add the feature if the extension is deemed useful by users, i.e. shown some love. I personally found it amazing and will be sending the developer a cake in hopes that it’ll get that feature implemented sooner.

Even if it doesn’t correct all the typos you make, it corrects some of them and there is no harm in having it run in the background.

Install ezAutoCorrect for GMail Extension For Gmail

AutoCorrect Typos In GMail When Composing Emails [Chrome]

QTranslate - Free Translator Utility for Windows

QTranslate: A free Translator Utility for Windows 7

QTranslate is a free Windows utility that translates texts using online translation services. Once the text is entered in a text-box, it automatically detects the language and displays the desired output in the second text-box.

Input is translated using the most popular online language translation service – The Google Translate (default). However, one is free to choose any other online sources provided below;

• Yahoo! Babel Fish
• Microsoft Translator
• Promt Mobile
• SDL

Translations can be performed from within applications, such as browsers, PDF readers, word processors, etc. The program also includes a built-in spell checking utility that tracks spelling of the provided inputs and translated texts.

The text entered is invariably translated in English, by default, but one has the option to select any preferred language from the drop-down menu for translation.

Translation services can be toggled by clicking on any of the web service names from the bottom of the interface.

QTranslate has two modes of translation by mouse selection,

• Show icon- A program icon appears near the cursor whenever a text is highlighted or selected. Clicking on the icon opens up a window that displays translation of the selected text.
• Show translation- Instantly displays the translated text of the selected text in a pop-up window. The headset icon on the right bottom of both text-boxes is readily accessible that can make the tool speak the text.

The program also provides a virtual keyboard that has the capability to scan and view history page. To access the keyboard, click the keyboard icon residing at top right corner of the main interface and select desired language from the drop down menu.

Main features of QTranslate in a nutshell:

• Translates text in any application that supports text selection (Acrobat Reader, Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Skype, etc.)
• Text to speech synthesis and spell checking
• Word suggestion/auto-complete (Ctrl+Space)
• History of translations (Ctrl+H)
• Virtual keyboard

Other settings for QTranslate can be configured from the system tray menu (Options).

Download QTranslate from here.

QTranslate is compatible with Windows 7 too.

QTranslate: A free Translator Utility for Windows OS | The Windows Club

Check If Your Password Has Been Compromised

ShouldIChangeMyPassword Tells If Your Password Has Been Compromised

The last year has seen a number of high profile security breaches. ShouldIChangeMyPassword tells you if your login was among the compromised.

The biggest problem with the compromises (such as the high profile ones at Sony, Gawker, MySpace, and more) is that many people use the same password for multiple services. Once hackers know your login at one service they can then try it out at multiple services and potentially gain access to other services.

ShouldIChangeMyPassword calls on the released databases (many of the hacking groups released the compromised account databases as evidence of their successful breach) and tells you if your email as among the breached systems. We plugged in an email address we knew had been involved in at least one breach last year. Here were the results of the search:

So what do you do if your email address shows up as a breached account email address? You need to start changing your passwords. Check out our guide to recovering from a serious password breach for tips and tricks to help lock down your accounts with secure passwords. If you’re in the habit of using the same or similar passwords for most of the services you use, you should change them anyway. ShouldIChangeMyPassword only pulls from the databases that groups have released after high profile breaches; it doesn’t give you an absolute answer on whether or not all your passwords are secure.

ShouldIChangeMyPassword Tells If Your Password Has Been Compromised - How-To Geek ETC

Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam

Rethinking the ‘Never Unsubscribe’ Rule for Spam

When it comes to junk mail, the rule, for 15 years, has been: Never respond. Don’t even try to unsubscribe, even if they give you instructions for doing so. You’re just letting the spammer know that your e-mail address is “live,” and that you’re a dummy who actually opens those messages and reads them. You’ll wind up getting put on even more spam lists as a result.

Well, I think it’s time to revisit that advice.

I use Mac and Windows, but my main carry-around machine is a Mac laptop. Onto it, I’ve installed an amazing antispam program called SpamSieve. After reading countless glowing reviews, I gave it a try, and found it indispensable. It works with all Mac e-mail programs, and does an astonishing job of putting all spam from all my accounts into the Spam folder.

I still have to pore over it, though. Every now and then, a piece of legitimate mail winds up in there.

Now, my e-mail addresses are fairly public. I do have one private address that I never, ever use on the Web. (That’s how spammers get your e-mail address, by the way — they scour the Web for e-mail addresses that people type into forms online. Which is why you, too, should have a separate e-mail address that you use only for private correspondence and never use when, for example, ordering products or signing up for things.)

But since my addresses are public, I get added to every mailing and spamming list under the sun. And even with SpamSieve’s assistance, it’s gotten out of control — the amount of time I have to spend double-checking the spam folder is growing year after year.

So a couple of months ago, I decided to try an experiment: I’d violate the old rule. I’d deliberately try to unsubscribe from every spam list. And I’d report on my findings.

First, the good news: it worked. An awful lot of the spam comes from “legitimate” companies. Now, I don’t consider spamming O.K., ever, and I think these companies should be ashamed of themselves. But “legitimate” means that they’re real companies with real Web sites and names and addresses — and, almost always, real Unsubscribe buttons at the bottom of the spam.

The best Unsubscribe button by far is the one provided by something called SafeUnsubscribe. I don’t know much about it, except that it’s a service offered by a company called Constant Contact, and it claims to have 370,000 customers — companies who pay to use SafeUnsubscribe.

Bottom line: When you see SafeUnsubscribe at the bottom of the message, click it. You land on a Web page that basically says, “O.K., that’s it. We’ve taken you off ALL mailing lists.” One click.
These 370,000 companies, clearly, are the ones with a guilty conscience. “We’re going to spam you, but gosh, we feel bad about it — at least we’ll make it easy for you to get off our lists!”

I like SafeUnsubscribe because it (usually) knows, and fills in, your e-mail address. What really irks me is the other ones: spam with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom — and when you click it, you go to an unsubscribe page when you have to type in your email address! You spammed me, you idiot — you already know my e-mail address!

Those “dumb” unsubscribe buttons mean that I have to go back to my e-mail program and look up which address they spammed, then go back to the Web page and paste it in. When you have 30 of those a day, it’s exhausting.

Anyway: after a couple of months of this, I’m happy to report that, as far as I can see, not a single one of these companies has contacted me again. Unsubscribing in 2011 really works.

(Note that I’m talking about spam with an Unsubscribe button at the bottom. The ones pitching you Viagra or bigger body parts won’t unsubscribe you — and don’t pretend that they will.)

The corporate spam, in other words, is usually easy to stop.

Now, the bad news: That spam isn’t very much of the total volume. I’m still inundated by the less responsible spam:

– All kinds of messages in Russian and Asian languages. (Hint: Dudes, you’re wasting your time.)

– A million, zillion e-mails from a firm called Rodman & Renshaw (not sure if it’s really them, or someone impersonating them).

– The usual phishing scams — fake e-mails from banks (that I don’t even have accounts with), asking me to log in to correct some kind of error.

– A million “I was in the U.K. and I was mugged, old pal! Can you help me out?” scams.

– Variations on the old Nigerian scam: “I’ve just come into possession of $50 million, and I need your help getting it out of the country…”

– Invitations to have my product manufactured at a company in China.

– A lot of weird ones where the entire message is a single Web link. Do they think I’m some kind of sucker?

In any case, I think it’s time to revise the old “Never respond” rule. It’s true that you should never, ever respond to a piece of spam by rewarding it with a purchase. Don’t ever click “click here” — you’re only encouraging them.

But my experiment (confirmed by my Twitter followers) is that clicking legit-looking Unsubscribe buttons does reduce the spam flow, if only from actual companies.

And perhaps best of all, it gives you a fleeting, illusory feeling that you actually have a way to fight back.

Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam - NYTimes.com