The folks at FareCompare have improved their site to create a new fare search tool. It builds on the lists of newly-lowered fares that they’ve been offering for the last few weeks (previously mentioned here).

The new tool is notable in that it lets you list and sort fares not only by destination (obviously), but by airline, price, price per mile cost, and price change. Looking to find a cheap fare to beef up your mileage balance? Search by price per mile. Looking to find the recent fare sales? Search by savings. But perhaps most importantly for people loyal to a particular airline, it allows for sorting by major US carrier. (International destinations are covered, but not international airlines. JetBlue and Southwest aren’t included either.)

It’s reminiscent in some ways of the Travelocity-powered fare lists on Yahoo — see the Chicago example here. To view another city, change the last three letters in the link to the city or airport code for your desired departure location. But the FareCompare tool is better.

There’s room for improvement, of course: I’d still like to see an option to search fares by departure date, or at least departure month, right up front, before clicking on the output. It’s annoying to find a low fare for a destination you’re traveling to next month, only to find the fare is only valid for this coming weekend.

But it’s a great start. Add it to your arsenal of travel search tools.