Over the course of a couple of years Google has honed its search engine algorithm so far that, regardless of what search terms are entered, the corresponding Wikipedia page appears as the first hit. Now there would appear to be just one last tweak to perfect this system, and I may very well be prepared to take it in the near future.

Now if that isn’t going to be the last straw, it’s Google’s general dereliction of duty that should have put me on the qui vive. No longer can literal searches be made, pages turn up that do not contain the search terms (and Google doesn’t tell you). Google could have made itself into a wonderful tool to detect plagiarism, and because of its standing in the computer world could have led the way in establishing a standard method of comparing copying in different texts. But no…

Yet hope springs eternal.

I have a bevy of trusted sources (aka Facebook friends) who perform such useful tasks as doing my science and technology news reading for me, and then sharing it with me and their other FB friends. One such report was that Google had a flight search engine online that would find cheap and short flights, so I fairly soon went over to check it out.

Over at flights.google.com, I was first of all impressed by the speed with which flights were found, the lack of countless pop-up windows that seem to the defining characteristics of German travel sites, and the options of finding either cheap and/or short flights to the desired destination. All that was needed (as per bloody usual) was a couple of options to determine departure and arrival time preferences, and—at the speed that they were operating it shouldn’t have been that difficult—a multiday search, so that genuine bargains could be found. But apparently it’s still in beta.

Then one day I decided I might try looking beyond the search results and initiate a booking. At which point the prices changed radically. For the worse. Whatever Google’s sources for the prices were, they were nowhere to be found.

Sucked in, chewed up, spat out.

So it was back to the usual suspects with their pop-ups. Being a methodical person, I made myself a grid, proposed a couple of criteria for excluding flights from consideration and searched diligently and was able to come up with maximum price difference of around €250 over a one week period for the flights both there and back. Taking into consideration that I wanted to go for at least 56 days, one of the pairs of flights was the cheapest of the lot and I proceeded once again to the booking stage.

My legal beagles advise me to state that the next thing that happened borders on fraud. We will see why when I analyse what happened. In any case I was directed to travelgenio.com, which offered not only a handsome price, but also a special discount into the bargain. The only problem was that there was no payment option the ticket could be purchased with at this price. As soon as I chose any payment option, the discount went out the window, and there was some payment surcharge depending on the credit card or bank transfer that had been chosen, pushing the price up by well over €100.

So how was the aggregator, swoodoo.de, coming up with these prices? Looking carefully at the payment options at travelgenio I noticed that if you had a visa card you had to choose from one of 3 or 4 varieties of visa card in the payment option, there was no garden variety option. Swoodoo had queried travelgenio with the payment option of a visa card and travelgenio had replied with something like “Yes, we no have ‘visa’” which was interpreted by one or both sides as being payment charge = 0.

I say this borders on fraud, because it is quite possible that some genio at travelgenio decided that a random list of the different types of visa card might be useful to the customer (but to who exactly? You can’t tell from the card what kind of credit or debit card it is). On the other hand, it might also just have been a ploy to pretend that the booking fee was zero until such time as the deal had to be sealed and rely on the something akin to extortion to get the customer to pony up the extra.

Anyhow, it was back to swoodoo to search again with a different payment option. Sure enough the same flight turned up again from another operator, with no hidden charges suddenly appearing. Even with the awe-inspiring name of cheaptickets.de the booking went through and I got my ticket. Bad on travelgenio.