So, in his spare time, he started writing code. That code became . The "Q" Factor: A New Kind of Search ITA didn’t build a travel agency. They built a raw computation engine called QPasa (later just "Q"). Think of it as Google for airline tickets—but a decade before Google became a verb.
Enter . A brilliant MIT-trained computer scientist and avid traveler, Wertheimer was frustrated. He knew that the underlying data of all flights—schedules, fares, rules—existed, but no tool could search it with any real flexibility.
By 2005, ITA was the silent giant. They weren't a consumer brand, but they powered the search for If you searched for a flight online in the mid-2000s, there was a 60% chance the search ran through ITA’s Boston-based servers. The Google Acquisition & The Public Matrix In 2010, a massive tech war broke out. Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Amazon all tried to buy ITA. The prize was the world’s best flight-search engine.