> while you're waiting for results, how many airlines they're comparing on your behalf.
Of course as someone in computers I know that the computer can do all of the actually work faster than my screen can refresh. Even accounting for network latency, all the work is done in less than 1 second - everything else is either inefficient code, or intentional delays to make the problem seem harder than it really is. Both of them are things that anyone with computer training should object to.
Aha, yes of course I'm only talking about cases where the actual processing time is over 1 second and you can't help but make the user wait (or do something else in app in the meanwhile)...
Delaying a 1 sec process to show me 10 sec of ads is one of the many definitions of evil
Sometimes the ads are subtle. Tax software isn't showing ads directly - they are just trying to give the idea that taxes are hard and so you should be glad to pay a lot of money for it - even though all the calculations are a few ms for any modern computer once it has the data. However if you think taxes are easy the whole industry goes away.
I'm not sure you're right here. I used to work with the hipmunk founders and I recall them mentioning that the comparison/flight search is actually pretty computationally expensive.
Even Google flights takes special consideration to show loading indicators here, and I'm sure they've put a lot of resources behind making it fast.
Of course as someone in computers I know that the computer can do all of the actually work faster than my screen can refresh. Even accounting for network latency, all the work is done in less than 1 second - everything else is either inefficient code, or intentional delays to make the problem seem harder than it really is. Both of them are things that anyone with computer training should object to.