The Boston Globe spends quite a few words on a new fare search site that hasn’t even gone live. It hasn’t even gone truly beta. The new site, Farecast, is in “private beta” — meaning you need an invitation to be able try out the site.

Farecast goes beyond a cute name. It promises to go a step further than FareCompare’s graphical plotting of the past year’s fares, as reported here last week. Farecast’s goal is to predict the direction fares will go, with a confidence percentage (how confident it is of its prediction) so you can decide whether to buy now or wait.

A neat idea, but it’s clearly not quite ready for primetime yet.

The downsides? 1) So far, the site only includes searches from Boston or Seattle. 2) Southwest fares are excluded, which distorts predictions, since a good Southwest fare sale can send the other airlines into a tizzy. 3) If you see a fare you like, you can’t always book it through the site. You may still need to go to Kayak, Travelocity, Orbitz, or the airline to buy the fare. 4) With current oil prices, and rising fares, it doesn’t take much sophisticated programming to create a site that always suggests buying now.

Farecast isn’t alone in the space either. Coming soon: FlySpy, offering a similar product. I can imagine FareCompare or Kayak adding a prediction function, too. Who will win out in the end? Let me check my crystal ball…