Go try Farecast.com

I love Farecast almost as much as I love TripAdvisor. And as I was booking my trip to Mexico City I noticed that Farecast has been acquired by Microsoft. But why? It's a great flight search engine, but that's been done by Orbitz, Expedia etc. No, what's cool is its historic database. That's where the real action is. Imagine what you could do with millions of historic flight fares stored and cross-referenced in a "black box" and available to you and me on the web?

Farecast gives you predictions on whether airfares will hold, go up or go down and that means, if you're a planner like me, you can decide when its best to buy a flight...now or later? Microsoft probably wants to take a peek under the hood of the database and also get its hands on the advertising inventory and eyeballs of Farecast repeat visitors. And I guess as Expedia was founded by Microsoft in 1995 it has some travel game experience.