Bing

Active Answers give you flight status

March 23, 2009, 06:33 PM by Bing | 3 Comments

Air travel is always a hassle.  Picking someone up — is the flight on time? Going on a flight — have the terminal and gate changed? You can now check all of this quickly and easily on Live Search.

Live Search is becoming more than just a place to get information — it is also a place you can do things.  We are simplifying key tasks with Active Answers, a new method of retrieving up-to-the-minute data from the Web. To help with your air travel information needs, our first Active Answer release is for flight status. You can type in a specific flight number into the search box (for example, Alaska 328), and Live Search will provide detailed status information on a particular flight, including terminal and gate information.

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You can also do a generic query, flight status, and we’ll display interactive boxes on the results page for the user to fill in. Pretty Cool!  

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Look for more Active Answers soon, brought to you by Microsoft Research and Live Search.   

MJ Lee, Senior Program Manager, Live Search

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Comments

Matthew Weyer

Posted On March 25, 2009, 09:28 PM

Cool tool!  One suggestion: recognize ICAO airline designators as well as IATA.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAO_airline_designator#ICAO_airline_designator

For example, I search UA1 and I get United Airlines flight 1:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?FORM=IEFM1&q=ua1

But, I search UAL1 and I get nothing:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=ual1&go=&form=QBRE

If you look underneath the United logo, Wikipedia lists the ICAO designator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_airlines

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL1

A lot of sites use them since they're usually more descriptive.  For example, Southwest Airlines IATA is WN, but their ICAO is SWA [much easier to remember].

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=swa1

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wn1

I love how you guys have more details than Google.  Now what you need to do is compile the data from Flightstats so if I search my flight number, I know where it's coming from.  I do this manually now by searching arriving gate/plane type information.

@Matthew


Melissa Powell

Posted On March 27, 2009, 01:56 PM

@Matthew -- We're so glad you think we have a cool tool, and that the details we provide are useful.  We appreciate your comments about the ICAO codes, and where a flight is coming from.  We will look into your suggestions for future releases of the product.  Meanwhile, I should add that the current answer does respond to many scenarios with ICAO codes, like “flight status ual” or “UAL 1” (note the space), but not to “UAL1”.  And, thanks again for your comments – we really appreciate a satisfied customer

Melissa Powell, Live Search


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