Farecast's sale to an unknown buyer is the latest score for superstar University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni, who has watched several of his Internet companies gobbled up at attractive valuations over the past 15 years.

Those include comparison shopping service NetBot, which was acquired by Excite in 1997, and MetaCrawler, a search engine that is now part of InfoSpace.

Farecast founder Oren Etzioni in 2004. P-I photo

Last night while chasing the Farecast story, I reached out to the founder of the Seattle startup to get his take on the deal. He couldn't say much, but did congratulate me for breaking the news. (Another confirmation.)

"Unfortunately, as a (former) board member of Farecast, I'm legally bound to say 'no comment' at this point," he wrote in an e-mail.

But Etzioni's colleague at the UW, Ed Lazowska, was more than happy to offer a few nuggets.

"UW (computer science and engineering) has a long history of creating and deploying innovative (artificial intelligence) applications on the Web including the Web's first successful full-text search engine (WebCrawler, acquired by AOL and then Excite), first successful meta-search engine (MetaCrawler, acquired by Netbot and then InfoSpace), first comparison-shopping engine (Jango, acquired by Excite), first Web question-answering system (inspiration for Microsoft's AskMSR), and first predictive travel search engine (Hamlet, now Farecast.com).

Oren has been in the middle of all of this. He's a faculty member at heart (his father was a faculty member before him, a world-reknowned sociologist): he works with students to do science that looks out 5-10 years, motivated by problems that matter. There are many more great ideas in his lab and in his head."

One of the latest circulating in Etzioni's brain is a project called KnowItAll, a more intelligent search engine. Given Etzioni's track record, I am sure the venture capitalists are keeping tabs on that and other projects in his lab.

In 2004, Etzioni joked that Farecast -- then known as Hamlet -- was going to do well because the tiny startup shared its headquarters with a bank branch.

"I take this as an omen that we are going to make a lot of money," he said at the time.

It looks as if Etzioni's prediction may have come to pass. And since he is an expert in predictive technologies (like the one Farecast uses to show whether airfares are going to increase or decrease,) it is probably worth listening when he makes a forecast.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to uncover who purchased Farecast. If it is Expedia -- and at this point I have only heard rumors -- it may be worthwhile to mark May 1 on the calendar. That is the day that Expedia plans to release first-quarter results, an event that companies sometimes use to jointly announce acquisitions.

I also thought there might be a remote possibility that the newly merged SideStep/Kayak.com could be a possible suitor for Farecast, though spokeswoman Kellie Pelletier tosses water on that theory. She tells me this morning that they are not the buyer.

Pelletier said there's been a lot of speculation in their office this morning, but she had not heard anything definitively. One name that has come up frequently: Expedia.

Stay tuned and let me know if you hear any more details.