Needle is ITA Software’s innovative new platform for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web.

Well, the Internet is large and chaotic, and finding the right data can be like finding... you guessed it.  Moreover, a needle is used to stitch things together—and stitching together multiple data sources with different formats, schemas, and vocabularies into a unified tapestry of data is just what our Needle does best.

If you think you or your organization might find a use for Needle, please feel free to apply to join our preview program. A Needle tutorial is also available.

ITA Software's main business is indeed serving the travel industry. Our flagship product, QPX, revolutionized airfare search, and now powers the shopping path on most major airline and travel search websites.  Now, with Needle, we're aiming to revolutionize other forms of vertical search, too.  By dramatically lowering the time and cost required to aggregate a comprehensive database of any domain, we hope to extend our impact beyond air travel to literally any domain where the data is currently too disaggregated, unpolished, or difficult to use efficiently.

Most web-scraping tools are brittle and have severe problems dealing with web pages that are even slightly irregular in format. Needle uses advanced machine-learning techniques to extract data from a wide range of web-pages and other data sources quickly, reliably and robustly, without requiring any specialized knowledge of programming concepts, HTML structure, or regular expressions.

Moreover, other web-scraping tools consider their work done once they've extracted each site's structured content.  When it comes to the rest of your job—transforming each site's content into your target database schema, finding and reconciling duplicates, correcting mistakes, and publishing a unified view of the data from all sources—then you've been on your own.  Until now.

Yes, if you create a Needle database, your data can only be accessed by those you designate, ranging from a fixed number of individuals to everyone on the public Internet, as you see fit. Needle's servers are maintained in the same proven datacenters, and by the same proven operations staff, that have run ITA Software's airfare search engine for years.

Databases created by Needle customers are their own to license as they see fit. However, ITA Software has created a number of databases suitable for deployment to airline and other travel websites.

Please take the time to read about Needle Travel Information Services, or try out our corporate demo site, Matrix 2, which combines month-at-a-time airfare search with Needle-aggregated event, attraction, tour and restaurant listings for destinations in the United States and Canada.

Needle operates as a hosted online service, so there is nothing to download. All Needle operations can be controlled through web-based interfaces, and you can connect your own applications and systems to Needle using web-services APIs.

During this limited preview program, Needle usage is free for non-commercial use by qualified applicants.  Please contact us to discuss commercial pricing details.