You may be familiar with the usual onebox which has been around since 2006 (image below) and requires you to input two valid airport codes for it to appear. Lucky for us at Expedia we somehow ended up with the default link and the first link amoungst the other OLTAs.
Today (8/19) when searching for “Las Vegas Flights” Google presented me with a new and improved version. Displaying several airports as options for me to choose as an origin, along with deeplinks into specific airline carrier search results and expandable schedule info (note that this is appearing on my iPad, so I did test using iPad’s user-agent in FF but haven’t been able to reproduce):
When clicking an origin airport you’ll then be presented with a similar onebox to the usual version, only there’s no more primary link to Expedia 🙁 or date input fields, and the expandable schedule info is obviously narrowed down to only the selected origin:
So what does this mean for us SEO’s? Well I guess in reality it’s just another example of traditional organic results getting less overall real estate, like we’ve seen for geo terms since universal search became the norm. And for me, probably less traffic than a good old position 1 ranking!
What surprises me is that this is an organic placement that hasn’t been offered as a paid search innovation. Obviously this would offer a great way for Google to potentially make additional ad revenue.
I expect this is Google’s first innovation following the acquisition of ITA. And since Kayak are included in this onebox, I guess this does prove I was wrong, with my hunch that Google bought ITA to kill off vertical search travel sites!
Are any other mozzers being bucketed in this A/B test?
