Yahoo Moves Metasearch Engine FareChase To Travel Homepage

TechCrunch noticed that Yahoo has moved the FareChase metasearch engine to the homepage of Yahoo Travel. TechCrunch attributes this move to the recent nearly $200 million acquistion of SideStep by competitor Kayak. I’ve always thought that FareChase was a very strong property that wasn’t being fully leveraged by Yahoo. Yahoo acquired FareChase in 2004.

Yahoo is also showing FareChase in response to selected travel queries. For example, here’s the result for “flights to London”:

Online travel-related bookings are worth more than $100 billion annually in the US. Here’s some additional analysis from the Kango blog (a new travel engine from former Yahoo Travel GM Yen Lee).