Air travel is always a hassle.  Picking someone up — is the flight on time? Going on a flight — have the terminal and gate changed? You can now check all of this quickly and easily on Live Search.

Live Search is becoming more than just a place to get information — it is also a place you can do things.  We are simplifying key tasks with Active Answers, a new method of retrieving up-to-the-minute data from the Web. To help with your air travel information needs, our first Active Answer release is for flight status. You can type in a specific flight number into the search box (for example, Alaska 328), and Live Search will provide detailed status information on a particular flight, including terminal and gate information.

 

You can also do a generic query, flight status, and we’ll display interactive boxes on the results page for the user to fill in. Pretty Cool!  

Look for more Active Answers soon, brought to you by Microsoft Research and Live Search.   

MJ Lee, Senior Program Manager, Live Search