Hope for the anti-Googlers with news that the search giant is happy to pull the plug on one of its experiments to provide real-time pricing in search results.
Unfortunately, those terrified about Google's foray into travel through the proposed acquisition of ITA Software will probably have to continue with their sleepless nights - Google is only pulling out of its test to provide search results on Maps of properties for sale or rent.
Google officials say the test - allowing users to search and then check the value of properties on the market via Google Maps - is being "retired" from February 10 2010.
Another experiment launched October 2009 to use data from mortgage advertisers in a type of price comparison/metasearch continues apace, however.
The house pricing test is being axed due to "low usage" and, perhaps most interestingly in the wider context of the ITA deal, because of the "proliferation of excellent property-search tools" elsewhere around the web.
The end also comes as Google upgrades its existing Google Base Data API (the tool used to post and position data) for the newer Content and Search APIs for shopping.
There are some comparisons with what Google is probably thinking of doing in the travel space, such as using supplier data to help improve search results, but the similarities probably end there...
...not least because Google didn't spend $700 million buying a company to help it.
On other words: travel is clearly not an experiment for Google.
One thing to consider is whether Google may have been able to do something in travel, a "lite" version, say, similar to the mortgage and housing tests?
Google has relationships with hundreds, probably thousands of travel advertisers, many of which use prices in their advertising to feed price comparison services (similar to how the mortgage supplier test works).
But such a scaled down service, for a complicated product as travel, probably wouldn't have met either Google's or consumer expectations.
And, arguably, those campaigning against Google over the acquisition of ITA Software, both publicly and privately, would have still been sufficiently outraged to work tirelessly against any move by Google to do anything of note in travel.
Dark forces abound.
Some might say that Google has nothing to lose by trying to acquire ITA Software (only gaining a red face if it fails), given the bounty that is supposedly waiting for it on the other side of approval by the Department of Justice.