Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. Farecast premiered to the public in May 2006, and went through a year of beta testing before emerging from beta on May 15th, 2007. Within the travel industry, Farecast is the first and only website to offer predictions on when is the best time to purchase airline tickets ^[1].

The company was Founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni (founder of MetaCrawler and a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington), and has collected over 175 billion airfare observations^[2] to date. Farecast's team of data miners use these airfare observations to build algorithms to predict future airfare price movements. MetaCrawler is a metasearch engine that searches results from About, Ask Jeeves, Google, LookSmart, MSN, MIVA, Yahoo! and other popular search engines. ... The University of Washington, founded in 1861, is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. ... Data mining (DMM), also called Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD) or Knowledge-Discovery and Data Mining, is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns using tools such as classification, association rule mining, clustering, etc. ...

In May 2007 the company released results of an independent audit verifying Farecast's prediction accuracy at 74.5 percent and also launched additional features such as Farecast Alerts (a notification service that will inform travelers of key price drops) and a flight quality filter that allows travelers to sort flights by type. In February 2007 Farecast introduced Fare Guard^[3], which allows customers to lock-in a specific price for a flight and be protected from future price increases for the following seven days.

Press and industry coverage

2007:

• Reuters Farecast went live on May 15, 2007 after about a year in beta testing
• TravelCom Res-Expo Innovator of the Year
• WSA Consumer Product of the Year
• PC World 20 Most Innovative Products for 2007

2006:

• Popular Science Best of What's New 2006
• Kiplingers Top 25 Travel Sites
• Business Week Best of Web
• Time Magazine 50 Coolest Sites
• Frommer's Editors Choice

External links

• Farecast.com Official website

References

1. ^ While other sites list airfares, newcomer forecasts where they're headed. boston.com (2006-06-04).
2. ^ Farecast.com Launches Airfare Deals Based On Science, Not Marketing. Farecast.com (2007-03-13).
3. ^ Locking in a fare. chicagotribune.com (2007-02-04).

For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ... June 4 is the 155th day of the year (156th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... March 13 is the 72nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (73rd in leap years). ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... February 4 is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...