Bored looking at the same existing ui?

Here is a new and fresh look and feel for our search results page.

We have tried to show the results in more user friendly manner.

We have avoided the repetitions (The departure and arrival times used to repeat). In routes which involve at least one change-over, we are now showing the wait time at the transit station.

Along with this we have made some changes to how we get the routes. We now fetch the routes on demand. If you search from Bangalore to Mumbai, initially we show you the train routes. We get the flight routes only if you are interested in it, i.e, if you click on Flights tab. This applies to Bus and Train+Flight routes also. With this we have avoided loading your browser with routes which you don’t want.

Try it out and tell us what you feel about our new UI.

Please see the below images to understand the changes. The images on the left hand side are of the old UI and those on the right hand side are of the new UI.

Flight view in old version

Flight view in new version

Train view in old version

Train view in new version

Bus view in old version

Bus view in new version

Train+Flight view in old version

Train+Flight view in new version

90di.com came fourth at pluggd.in poll for Indis’s most trusted travel search site among 12 sites polled. This poll drew amazing user participation with more than 1000 votes casted. We thank all our users for putting their trust in us.

We are often asked this question as to why we don’t do booking ourselves on our site. And also what is our business model. As Sanjay asks here.

So I am trying to breifly answer to the questions posed by Sanjay and others:

We consciously do not do any booking ourselves. Where as we find the best flights directly from the Airlines and also take the user for booking directly with the Airline. Likewise we do for other things like Trains, etc.

In short we are a travel search engine. Or in other words,  a vertical search application for travel.

Vertical search is believed to be how the next generation search engines will be. Highly domain-context based, rather than just keyword based.

Travel search is one such category in the new breed of vertical search engines. In US travel search engines like Kayak have gained a very high market share. There is no reason why the same should not happen in India, going forward.

Last week we released Route ranking for trains. Now we have it for flights too. Once you click on the stars which depict the rating you see a pull down as shown in picture below:

flight route rating dialog

You can see the the 90di engine tries to analyze a lot of parameters that makes sense for a flight journey, e.g. the carrier type, overall duration etc. and gives a ranking to the route on a scale of 10.

You can give your opinion on the engine’s analysis as well as give comments about any aspect of the route.

We intend to use your comments to improve the engine’s analysis and ranking further over time.

Your comments are most welcome.

We are constantly making changes to our UI so that you get the maximum benefit from our search results. In this process we are now showing the results in a tabbed view. The results are categorized into only train routes, only flight routes and routes having trains and flights, and displayed in different tabs.

Following is a screen shot of the same.

Tabbed View of search results

As the year 2008 comes to an end and we enter 2009, 90di team wishes all our users a safe, happy and fulfilling new year. Year 2009 looks promising for all travel buffs with  drastic reduction in airline fares and falling fuel prices. So if you are not already on a holiday, may be its time to start planning for one. And you already know how to make you travel planning simple

No, we have not ventured into gaming and racing! Its just an update that 90di will now open with lightning fast speed even if you have slow Internet connection with  lighter version of 90di. So if the site is taking time to open or you are in hurry just switch to the basic html version. It is bandwidth friendly and should open much much faster.

It still has all the essential features like train and flight availability, fare and booking links. We have changed the result classification for better clarity. Now search results are categorized as direct trains, train combination(routes involving more than one train), direct flight, flight combination and train+flight combination.

Standard version with full features is still there and you can switch to it anytime you want. Check it out and give your suggestions.

We have seen from the way people try to search on 90di, that a lot of our users wanted to simply find out whether there is any direct connectivity between two places by train/flight etc. and to what are various options available to them.

So we just improved our search engine to churn out those search results.

This feature explained by  a few examples:
1) If you want to see all modes of travel between bengalooru to Goa, just type in:

bengalooru to goa

2) If you want to find out direct flights between bangalore Hyderabad:

Bangalore to Hyderabad flights

3) For trains between delhi to mumbai say

nizamuddin to mumbai trains

And as with the route search, you can use the station/airport codes and place names interchangeably.

Would love to hear what you think.

If you are using iGoogle, then here is a new widget for you.

We have created the 90di iGoogle widget. Click here to add it to your iGoogle and start using using it!.  Below is the screen shot of 90di widget.

Alternatively, you can click this button to add this widget to your iGoogle.

We love to hear from you regarding this.

Warm Regards,

Kiran

Hi All,

We sincerely acknowledge your feedback and inputs on 90DI. We have made several small changes which will simplify the usage of our website and also increase the speed of the search results.

Some of our users told us that they are finding it difficult to get a particular railway station in FROM/TO text boxes. We are grouping (mapping) the railway station/airport in/near a city. Earlier we were listing only the cities (and unmapped stations/airports) by default, but there was an option to list the railway stations/airports also. Since you found it difficult to use, we changed our approach. Now we show all the cities, stations/airports by default with clearly demarcating them. You can change this to list only the stations/airports or only the cities.

For Flight search, we are done away with the FROM/TO text boxes. Now we have the pre-populated drop-down boxes which will have all the airports listed. This will again ease the Flight search.

What we observed is, most of the users use one-way search instead of round-trip. So we made one-way search as the default search.

We have tried to increase the speed of the search by first getting all the direct routes and then getting the multi-leg routes, if required. Also, now we show only the available flights.

Please give your thoughts on these.