We recently made a number of minor enhancements and modifications in order to improve the way our international flight results work. Here's a quick round-up of the most important changes:

Grouping itineraries with the same price and airline

With our original design, a roundtrip search for Bombay to London would bring up over a hundred different options. Very often, a lot of the options shown were from a single airline and all at the exact same fare. The differences among these options boil down to differing stopover airports or connecting flights. So, we tweaked the design to show only one of those options with a link to see all the other available options. We think it makes more sense to group these flights together and expose them only to users that have a genuine interest in a specific airline/price combination.

Multiple airline filter

Are you one of those people that avoid mixed airline itineraries like the plague? Flying on an itinerary that contains multiple airlines can cause severe heart burn when flights are delayed or baggage is lost. Now, there's a nifty little filter that will remove all mixed airline itineraries from results with a single click.

Airline alliance filter

Finally, if you're an avid collector of airline miles, we've made it dead simple for you to select an airline that is part of your favourite airline miles program or alliance. Just click on the alliance name to display only those options which will let you earn more miles. We hope we've made it easier for you to never miss out on frequent flier miles ever again.

We've always been big fans of improving all the little things, because it's all the little things that add up to a big difference. We hope these little changes make it easier for you to pick the international flights that suit you best. Go ahead give them a whirl.

A couple of days ago, Jonathan Rosenberg, a Google Senior Vice President for Product Management, penned an epic-length paean to 'open' and what it means to Google. Essentially, the essay is 4,000 words of densely packed propaganda aimed squarely at justifying Google's uniquely conflicted position at the crossroad of Open vs. Closed.

Before we delve deeper into the conflict, let's give Google credit where it's due--the company has been a powerful force in establishing and furthering the use of open source software in the world as we know it. In addition, they have contributed many millions of lines of open source code to the world and will likely continue to do so for many years.

But Rosenberg's long-winded attempt to paint Google and it's love of "open" as the second coming of Christ, Our Saviour just doesn't sit well--what a crock. Google serves "openness" only when "openness" serves Google's profitability. Rosenberg even comes right out and admits this in that dreamy, flower-power language that Google PR brandishes like no one else on earth:

Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic...

... While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users.

So, they won't open their search code just to protect all us little users from the evildoers on the Internet? That would be believable if Google wasn't responsible for directly funding and even hosting these evildoers. It would be even more believable if Google's search results weren't choking on spam and filled with it.

Any serious examination of Google's true commitment to "openness" needs to ask and answer only two questions: 1) Where is Google open and why? 2) Where is Google closed and why?

Click to read more ...

First off, let me apologise for the radio silence on the blog of late. The past few months have been rather hectic as we were in the middle of a complete overhaul and rewrite for one of our major systems, which went live without too many hitches about three weeks ago. With that out of the way, we have a little more time for extracurricular activities on the blog.

Today we're thrilled to announce that as of last Friday, Cleartrip's flight search now includes Air India Express.

Air India Express (AI Express) is the low cost carrier launched by India's flag carrier, Air India. AI Express is the country's only low cost carrier operating on both domestic and international routes and has some fantastic fares, giving our customers savings of over 20% on busy routes such as Mumbai-Delhi and to Middle East destinations such as Dubai.

Our integration with AI Express also makes Cleartrip the only online travel agency to offer AI Express flights for both domestic and international bookings--making us the most comprehensive online travel agent around.

AI Express seats sell out fast, so make sure you book well in advance to take advantage of their amazing fares.

Twitter's traffic is going from strength to strength every day as millions of people use the microblogging service to stream both profundity and inanity. While the growth of Twitter's user base and traffic is impressive, it's not nearly as impressive as the meteoric rise in Twitter's perceived value amongst investors. The company recently announced closing a Series E round of financing, raising $100 million and valuing the company at over $1 billion.

Mashable has unveiled 5 shocking statistics around Twitter's valuation based on numbers from the Private Equity Data Center

1. The price of a single share of Twitter has increased by 239,619%, from a measly $0.00667 per share to a much stronger $15.9824.
2. Twitter’s $100 million round is more than 1025 times the amount of money they raised in their first round of funding. In July of 2007, Twitter raised $97,500.
3. In five rounds of funding, Twitter has raised an estimated $153 million. Since the day of its initial round of funding, Twitter has been given an average of $187,356 per day by its investors.
4. In the same time frame and given its current $1 billion valuation, Twitter’s worth has grown by $1,223,990 per day. If you start with the day that the the first tweet from Twitter’s Inventor and Chairman, Jack Dorsey was posted, then Twitter’s worth has grown by around $772,797 per day.
5. Twitter has yet to turn one red cent of profit.

These numbers are nothing short of astounding.

Despite the recent 5 day Jet Airways's pilots' strike, there seems to be no drop in passengers' willingness to continue to fly with Jet Airways. So far, in the month of September, Jet Airways is the top selling airline on Cleartrip. The two graphs below show airline sales volumes and market shares.

Interestingly, the pie-chart below shows that the Jet/JetLite combine has a whopping 27% share of sales, far ahead of any other airline.

There is an unwritten code of ethics that governs newspapers and news organisations the world over. As consumers of the news, we expect that these organisations be dedicated to reporting the news factually, accurately and without bias. The larger the audience a newspaper has, the greater the expectation that it strictly adhere to journalistic integrity. The number one rule of journalistic integrity is that one should report the news, not manufacture it or conjure it up out of thin air.

The Times of India, India's largest selling English daily, ran a story yesterday entitled Jet strike saw online agents hijack fares. Now, it is one thing for a newspaper to print sensationalist headlines, but to completely manufacture a story and falsify news crosses the line. The story alleges that online travel agents took advantage of the Jet Airways' pilots' strike to gouge customers and raise prices:

Online travel portals have reportedly been found to have raised fares to astronomical levels by means of "black marketing and hoarding," according to a top aviation ministry official. "We have found that some portals and airlines devised ways of going to fare levels of a nearly full flight to sell tickets at a premium," the official said.

This journalist is clearly from another planet; a planet where editors allow stories to be published even when they don't contain a single fact. The journalist has several quotes in the story from 'aviation ministry officials", but each quote is anonymous. The journalist also alleges that online travel companies pre-purchase tickets from airlines, something none of the online travel companies actually do.

The journalist does not interview or name even a single customer that was offered or purchased these 'astronomical' fares. Neither does the journalist present any research or evidence that shows price comparisons on online sites, nor is any particular online site named in the article.

The journalist goes on to state that tickets have "been sold for up to Rs 20,000." And that statement is what leads us to believe that this journalist actually writes for The Times of Mars and his story was mistakenly filed with The Times of India.

This graph shows the average price for one-way tickets sold by Cleartrip over the last two weeks:

The average price for the time period is Rs. 2,829; with a high of Rs. 2,952 and a low of Rs. 2,747. The actual numbers are a far cry from the journalist's imaginary Rs. 20,000 levels.

If this story was actually written to report the news on this planet, we have a tip for The Times of India's reporters--a news article is referred to as a 'story,' but that doesn't mean you get to make it up. Sloppy, lazy and sensationalist reporting is something we expect from tabloids, not from newspapers.

Human beings love to engage each other in debate, it's just part of our genetic makeup. And, most of the time, engaging in debate and discussion is a very useful and productive activity. Discussions prove useful as long as the parties involved in the discussion remain open minded and rational.

Staying open minded, by definition, implies that if someone is logically able to convince you that what you are saying is incorrect, you are willing and able to change your mind in order to agree with them. Staying rational throughout the discussion implies that you are willing to consider opposing viewpoints objectively, leaving your biases aside.

For the most part, it is worth spending time discussing and debating things. There is, however, a specific type of person with whom it is generally useless to discuss anything--someone who is neither open minded nor rational.

Arguing with this particular kind of person, is about as fruitful as arguing with a suicide bomber. Now, I've never personally had a debate with a real suicide bomber, but I imagine that suicide bombers of all shapes and sizes are neither open minded nor rational.

It makes no sense, whatsoever, to spend your time debating things with a suicide bomber, because you will never change their mind.

The problem with suicide bomber types is that they are completely impervious to data, logic, evidence, anecdote or any other device by which you may choose to persuade a reasonable human being; nothing you say will change their mind. For suicide bomber types, their own conviction alone is enough to make something absolutely true.

Here's how to recognise a suicide bomber in the middle of a debate:

• Passionate, to the point of being rabid, about whatever they believe in
• Willing to get all kinds of heated in pushing their point of view
• Offers very little in terms of data and evidence to back up their opinion
• Brushes aside all logical counterpoints to their arguments as irrelevant
• Keeps taking things out of context to point out your fallacies
• Draws completely illogical conclusions from what you say to detract from the main discussion
• Treats any opposition as a personal attack
• The reason they're right and you're wrong is that "You are not enlightened enough to understand"
• Starts spitting while speaking (with some, you may even notice foam build-up around the corners of the mouth)

The next time you're in a heated debate with someone, consider whether they display some of the characteristics listed above. If you find you're arguing with a suicide bomber, cut your losses and run--best to be very far away when the bomb goes off.

Previously we made data about India's most popular destinations available, with the data based on search volumes.

This time, we're basing the data on booking volumes instead of search volumes:

We further classified the destinations into business, leisure and pilgrimage and here's how they stacked up.

Top 3 business destinations:

1. New Delhi
2. Mumbai
3. Bengaluru

Top 3 leisure destinations:

1. Goa
2. Jaipur
3. Agra

Top pilgrimage destination:

1. Haridwar

Haridwar is the only pilgrimage destination to make our top 10 list for July.

Is this the toughest car you've ever seen or what?

Get more photos of Cleartrip's Mongol Rally team in Kazakhstan and in Uzbekistan.

It's been a little over four weeks since Cleartrip's Mongol Rally team set off from Goodwood, England and team No Right Turn has made it all the way across Europe and Kazakhstan.

The team is now traversing Russia and they've sent us some photographs of the ambulance in scenic Russia. Here's the ambulance posing with a statue of Lenin at Saratov:

Click here for more photographs