Is it true that price comparison websites, particularly flight comparison websites 'delay' the search results of price information so users feel that the search is comprehensive?
Otherwise what is the explanation for a 5 or 6 second delay for the results - surely looking up that information does not take that long?
Therefore is this a user friendly experience, so they feel like the search has been comprehensive, even if search results delivered instantly are the same?
Answer
The delay is due to the fact that since the flight information must be up to date both price-wise and availability-wise and not based on a cached database, as web search engines do, the server must contact multiple external services - those of all the flight companies to get up to date info, thus the delay. The chances that all of the results for your specific search are cached, especially since the cache must be short living (a day old flight availability is too old, whereas a day old webpage is reasonable), not to mention that technically there is a storage limit for the cached results which is probably much smaller than all the possible results (assuming the search company doesn't take high fees for covering a huge cache storage).
I am sure they appreciate the fact that some people think they are much faster than they really are and that the delays are actually only for sake of a dramatic effect :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment