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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

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Google Travel - ITA Acquisition

July 07, 2010

Google Thursday announced an agreement to acquire ITA Software, a flight information software company. We at Hitwise have been waiting for such an announcement for some time. In 2006 when Google Finance was launched, we looked at the top downstream industries from Google and noticed an obvious gap: Travel. Then again in 2008, when Google Health was launched we did the same analysis and pointed out the same gap.

The following table shows the top 20 downstream industries visited after Google in June 2010. Google's presence is obvious in most: Search Engines (Google.com), Entertainment (YouTube), Shopping and Classifieds (Google Shopping, Google Base), Business and Finance (Google Finance). Google's presence is perhaps less obvious in others: Social Networking and Forums (YouTube, Orkut, Google Talk), Education (Knol, Google Book Search, Google Scholar), Lifestyle (Blogger).

While Maps is an important component of our Travel category, Google has so far lacked a presence in the Travel subcategories of Travel Agencies or Destinations and Accommodations.

Travel industry executives are reportedly wary of the deal, concerned that Google will wield too much power. In June, Google was the #1 source of traffic to Travel Agencies, accounting for 15% of upstream visits. Google accounted for nearly 4 times the share of clicks to Travel Agencies compared with the #2 source of clicks, Yahoo! Search.

Destinations and Accommodations websites are even more reliant on Google for visits, with 32% of upstream clicks in June coming from Google.com. This is more than 6 times the share of clicks coming from the #2 traffic source, again Yahoo! Search.

It may have taken four years since our initial analysis for the acquisition but what does clickstream data tell us about Google's next potential foray? Games. After Travel, the next biggest downstream industry from Google.com is Games and Google does not yet have a presence in that industry. Stay tuned...

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