Agreed - significant downgrade for my usage.

Google Flights Question
 

How can I find out the number of base miles for the segment in Google flights?

There are a number of mileage calculators out there. milecalc.com, gcmap.com, etc.

GF does not provide that information. Type the segments into a mileage calculator like GCMap.com

I just came here after noticing this annoying change. How DO i see the flexible prices around my preferred travel dates now?

I used to love that feature! :(

Error booking on AA.com
 

I see some other folks are encountering itineraries on google flights not bookable on AA.com.

I am trying to book:
PVD > CLT > SJU (AA1700, AA756 12/17/16)
SJU > CLT > PVD (AA1847, AA1729 12/31/16)

Prices out to $283 on google flights. Here's a link. Same itinerary shows up on Matrix ITA, Kayak and Hipmunk. However, when I link to AA I get: "The system was unable to process your search. Please try again."

If I try multi city search on AA.com, I go through an endless loop where it keeps repricing @ $283 but it keeps saying, "price no longer available" and reprices with the same itinerary. Very frustrating :mad:

Any advice?

Update: interesting, now (a day later) the itinerary is pricing out correctly on AA.com linked from Google Flights... so I guess the moral of the story is, keep trying?

What database technology is Google Flights using?
 

...such that the search is so much faster and more flexible than any I've seen used by any of the airlines?

I would assume that they're not just throwing lots of server capacity at it, but that they are querying fare databases much more efficiently or something. To the point where in the amount of time to see the results for one day in any other search engine, I can see a month's worth of the result in Google Flights with the complicated criteria I want.

Very curious to know why they're able to do this...

It's based on ITA. A key reason it is faster is that it does not interactively check availability.

*****

Which might explain why, especially recently, I am getting back great search results making flights look cheap-- then deciding on an itinerary, looking at hotels, etc-- then when I go to actually book, these fares don't actually exist. Momondo seems to do the same thing. Some very small print says, "This fare was bookable more than 4 hours ago" or something like that. Ugh.
I wouldn't mind that ITA takes more time-- but 50% of the time, it comes back with a server time out.

It's not just ITA. Google consumes travel provider APIs directly as well. Due to its size, it is able to impose a number of complex API standards (including built-in filtering). I would imagine it uses a self-developed NoSQL style DB as a front-end cache, and a mix of pre-filling and online queries depending on the frequency of the query.

Google Flights - email function
 

I have the email notification turned on for Google Flights, but I have yet to receive any emails after a couple of weeks of tracking a few flights. I am checking them manually and I know there has been movement in prices. Am I doing something wrong?

A question about Google Flights
 

On Google Flights if I wish to do a search for something like 'Anywhere in Euope' to NYC, how do I enter Europe? If I type in 'Europe', I always get results for Lille Europe (XDB).

How can one resolve this?

I'll move this to Travel Tools...

Open ended Google flight searches only work in the reverse (e.g. Origin = NYC / Destination = Europe) @:-)