Just wanted to take a second to pimp Kayak.com. I had been making the rounds through the travel search usual suspects (Priceline.com, Orbitz, etc.). Orbitz (and cheaptickets.com which seems to be the exact same search engine) puts the brakes on my ancient computer with it’s huge, complex page layouts and floating options panel. So it was a relief to see the Google-ish minimal homepage at kayak.com, which i remembered reading about in the May issue of Cargo magazine.

But the best part about Kayak.com is there is no lame Playstation loading screen (ditto for Yahoo’s Farechase [via Barnako.com] which appears to be a clone of Kayak.com’s search engine, or vice versa). The results start loading immediately, and maybe even cooler is that you can filter the results on-the-fly with controls to add or remove airlines and airports, or narrow the arrival/departure time.

Having said all that, these search engines seem to poll the same sites, so the results are mostly the same. But if you can’t even see the results page, what’s the point? Kayak.com dynamically loads only the cheapest 10 fares into a fast, simple page design, and gives you options to instantly narrow or expand your search on top of that. Some of that “web 2.0″ fanciness making things a little nicer.