edit

Google Flights is a giant waste of time that will also save you money

A few days ago, a friend of ours called and told us that we should check out the revamped Google Flights.

"Be careful, though," he said. "Once you start playing around with it, you might end up going down a wormhole."

Intrigued, we clicked open a new browser tab and navigated over to Google Flights. The service has been around since 2011, but the search giant gave it a makeover a few days ago. We started messing around with various options available on the site and, before we knew it, 30 minutes had passed in the blink of an eye. We were down the Google Flights wormhole, and we couldn't stop.

Google Flights resembles travel search sites like Expedia and Orbitz, but in classic Google fashion, it's much simpler. Tell Google where and when you want to travel, and it comes back with flights sorted by best flight times and prices. It also takes a page from some of the previously mentioned travel sites by giving you options for cheaper flights; take an outgoing flight a day earlier than you planned and you'll save $260, Flight tells us.

So, yeah. You can save money with Google Flights. But that isn't even the coolest part. Here's the feature we like the best: instead of putting in specific destination cities, you can type in general locations. Let's say you want to go to Europe, you want to save some money and you don't care where you begin your journey. Just type "Europe" in the destination box, put in your desired dates and Flights pops up gorgeous photos of major destinations around Europe with the round-trip flight price overlaid on top.

Neat, right? It is an absolutely perfect tool for those of you who travel around the world in search of the perfect poker game. Want to leave Las Vegas and go to EPT Malta next week? Google Flights can get you there for $1,588 round trip. Not too shabby.

Google doesn't actually handle the transaction. To finish your travel booking, they redirect you to Expedia and other online travel outlets.

So essentially, Google Flights is a tool to simplify the process of searching for flights, and it does that with flying colors. Check it out sometime.

But set an alarm, because you might get sucked into the Google Flights wormhole.

What do you think?