Who knows, right? That's the thing. In the travel category, a lot of the value that an OTA brings is the shopping experience - which is essentially search (and yes, I am simplifying here. You need inventory, service etc. too). But if Google, who knows more about search than nearly anybody else, were to turn their hand to searching and aggregating travel themselves, what would this mean for ExpediOrbiLocity? What if Google had a super-slick search service that sent prospective travellers straight to the supplier, bypassing the OTA (like meta-search sites and things like Yahoo! FareChase are attempting to do now). Heck, Google already has a one-box for travel on their .com site. It's not that big a stretch. At a minimum, ExpediOrbiLocity would end up paying more to maintain their traffic, impacting their marketing efficiency. Beyond that, they could get cut out of the game completely. Conventional wisdom was that, since travel is such a big revenue source for paid search players, they would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces. I, however, have long thought it was just a matter of time. Now, it seems that the first real indication of their willingness to do this has materialized. - Stuart