Google has reached an agreement to buy ITA Software, a maker of air travel flight-information software whose customers include major airlines and online travel agencies. Google will pay US$700 million in cash for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software vendor, the companies announced on Thursday.

Google said in a statement that it plans to use ITA’s software to improve the ways in which people can find flight information online using Google search services.

Founded in 1996, ITA counts among its customers American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways, and Microsoft’s Bing. All existing agreements ITA has in place will be honored by Google, which plans to add new partners. The companies were scheduled to hold a press conference Thursday afternoon to discuss the deal.

Google is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation. It hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the “Google Guys” while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, with its initial public offering to follow on August 19, 2004. The company’s stated mission from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and the company’s unofficial slogan—coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit—is “Don’t be evil.” In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.