Sure, your recent flight was cheap, but on the other hand it was six hours late and thanks to the cramped seating you ate your knees the entire way. There's a new flight search engine available that does find you the cheapest flights, but also allows you to specify what other aspects of flight are important to you for resorting of results.

It's called InsideTrip.com, and it's available of course at http://insidetrip.com/ . If you've ever used flight search engines the front page will look familiar -- you specify the from and to airports as well as the leaving and return date (you can also search for one-way trips as well.)

It gets fun on the search results page. For example, I priced out trips from RDU to LAX. InsideTrip found me several pages' worth of trips starting at $498. The top of the search results page has a TripQuality "Dashboard", which is basically a series if checkboxes that allow you to specify a variety of factors which are important to you on a flight, including number of stops, security wait time, legroom, aircraft type and age, connect time, and lost bags rank.

Based on what you specify InsideTrip calculates a "TripQuality" score takes into account your priorities and gives a ranking up to 100, I think, though I never saw a ranking higher than the 80s. Each ranking is divided into three categories -- comfort, speed, and ease -- with little icons showing the ranking in each category. If you click on a category, you'll get details about that flight's quality ranking as according to this site.

That $498 fare might look great, but depending on your priorities you might want to search for a different flight once you learn that the flight's airline has a poor ranking for lost luggage, that the first leg of a two-leg flight has only a 60% on-time rate (sure you want to gamble on that 20-minute layover?), or that the particular flight is usually over 90% full.

If you decide you want to book a particular flight, you can click on Buy Now and InsideTrip will redirect you to Orbitz.

I like finding good flight fares, but I also like using flights that are on time more often than not and which have plenty of leg room. I'm gonna bookmark this one...