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Google Travel?

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills

Is Google building a travel portal? That's the conclusion of a ZDNet story (ZDNet is owned by CNET, parent company of News.com).

Google has posted a job opening for a senior account executive for a travel vertical based in Chicago on the job listings site of Mediabistro. "Your main responsibility is to drive new business revenue growth with our Fortune 1,000 advertisers in a specified vertical in one or more regions," the ad says.

"Now, let us consider the content. Google could work with any number of content partners, but could also include travel selections from its Google Video inventory," the ZDNet article says. "These selections could be integrated with destination guides, and even with keyword searches entered into Google Travel searches."

The article suggests that online travel site Orbitz, based in Chicago, could be the online travel agency partner for Google.

Robert Peck, an analyst at Bear Stearns, came to similar conclusions in a research note released Monday. "The position, located in Chicago, may involve partnering with one of the large OTAs (Online Travel Agencies). Orbitz (also in Chicago) would make sense due to Ask Jeeves' relationship with Expedia, and Travelocity's relationship with Yahoo," he wrote. "We would presume that Google is not looking to build its own OTA, but the combination of Google's traffic + inventory from an existing OTA could put pressure on the rest of the OTA industry."