I’m a big fan of metasearch engines – I.e. one search engine that sends out a single search request to a number of other search engines. This allows the entry of one set of search criteria that returns results simultaneously from many search engines, cutting the amount of time necessary to do your searches.
On the travel side, Kayak (www.kayak.com) is a metasearch engine for looking for travel pricing among a number of travel sites such as Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity, Hotwire, etc. It does a good job of speeding up price searches when you are looking for vacation or business travel deals.
It should be noted, however, that the travel search engines (and Kayak as a result) to not contain information about all airlines, hotels, etc. As an example, Southwest and JetBlue only list their schedules and airfares on their own sites.
