Flights...

[ummmm]

Why when you do a google search to a specific place, click on one of the links, put in your travel dates to then be told they don't fly to that destination? How do the come up in the google search?

It's so annoying.

[mushroom25]

you could almost google "flights to" and then insert a random string of characters and still get a hit.

far better to look up the airport site of your intended destination and find out who flies there, and from where.

[ummmm]

I'm obviously a rubbish traveller :-)

[The Builder]

Website rankings optimisation, Ummers. A whole bunch of tricks used to attract notice by Search Engines. Meta Tags and all that kind of stuff.

The really good ones can ignore some of your search terms completely, but still persuade the Search Engine to land there :o(

[ummmm]

It's a time wasting pain in the bum.

[Buenchico]

Google only provides an index of web pages. It hasn't got a clue as to what's inside the databases (of flight times and fares, for example) which can be accessed via those web pages.

If you're looking for a flight (rather than for a package deal) the trick is to start by googling to find the web page of your destination airport or, often far better, the Wikipedia page for that airport That will show you a list of all airlines operating to/from the airport.

For example, let's assume that I want to fly to Amsterdam. Googling 'Wikipedia Amsterdam Airport' quickly finds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol

Click on 'Passenger', under 'Airlines and Destinations', takes me down to here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Airport_Schiphol#Passenger

I can then quickly see which airlines operate from airports close to me and hence go to their individual websites to search for flights.

Easy peasy!

[ummmm]

Cheers Chris and Mushroom. I will get back to searching.

[mazie]

Have you tried Skyscanner ummmm?

http://www.skyscanner.net/

[Buenchico]

^^^Skyscanner is a useful tool but many budget airlines go out of their way to ensure that their flights do NOT appear on it. (That's because such airlines often make far more profit out of selling 'extras', such as accommodation or insurance, than they do from selling flights, so they don't want their flights to appear on third-party websites where they can't promote those extras).

[jno]

I did a search for Adolf Hitler the other day and one of the results was "Buy Adolf Hitler on eBay".

[ummmm]

Lol...How much is he selling for?