Microsoft has updated its Google-competitor search engine, Bing, to make it easier for users to access travel data. Users will be able to type in the cities they’re looking for and what they want to book and go from there.

Tired of filling out forms when booking flights online? With improvements to natural language search arriving in Bing, you no longer have to manually select your airport, destination, dates or other options to conduct a flight search. Just type what you’re thinking into the search box, and let Bing do the work.

For example, entering “flights from Boston to Los Angeles in June” will fill in the flight search forms with the parameters you need, putting you one click away from a list of results that match your query.

You can use a number of different combinations including airline names, number of stops or time of year.

At first it looked like Bing was playing catch-up with Google, yet again; however, it seems that Google doesn’t yet include the date portion of the query, but it does include the ease-of-finding travel bookings on search.

This announcement comes on the heels of Microsoft joining a coalition to block Google’s expected acquisition of ITA Software, a travel data company significant to exactly this. That Microsoft is rushing forward, trying to get ahead of Google on travel searching shows that they feel intimately threatened by the sort of competition this would bring. In fact, the article on their involvement mentions that the Department of Justice has joined the fray by starting an investigation into the planned buy.

The search wars continue apace.