Kayak is a travel search engine. It indexes hundreds of global travel sites to help you find the right flight, hotel, rental car or cruise line. Once you’ve found the way you want to travel, Kayak allows you to choose from which site you want to make your purchases.

The company was formed in January 2004 by co-founders of leading online travel agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. The company co-founders include Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terrell Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia. KAYAK is headquartered in Norwalk, CT and has an R&D center in Concord, MA. The company launched a beta site in May of 2004, and launched publicly in January of 2005.

KAYAK maintains advertising agreements with over 4,000 travel suppliers and online travel agencies including nearly every leading airline globally, most global hotel and car rental operators, and the leading online travel agencies including Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline. The company also has several affiliate marketing partnerships. KAYAK provides ‘white label’ products within other branded web sites including America Online, Comcast, USA Today, Roadrunner, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Pricerunner, and About.com.

Kayak is built on a Java, Apache and Linux platform. It uses XML-HTTP and Javascript to create a rich UI.