That is, Alphabet is required to separate their various products and not use data from one to influence the other.
I am guessing this is what is making Flights more cumbersome. But i think we need a legal expert to explain exactly how the law is causing this.
From my personal perspective, I remember flight search being really really crappy before Google flights hit the scene in ~2012.
Companies like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz, etc and the airlines themselves just weren’t getting the job done.
When Google flights gets refactored due to the regulations, my hypothesis is that we won’t see a spring of new innovation, but rather we’ll regress to the trajectory set by the old travel companies
Heck, if Google wanted they could publish some standard for exposing your site as a trip-booking tool that can appear right on a search results page like Flights does now, and if a page exposing that sort of embeddable widget ranks first in a search then it could display the widget above the results.
Skyscanner was launched in 2003 and Momondo in 2006.
Comparative search engines for flights existed long before Google trampled into the market.
I don’t see the need to have this embedded in Google SERPs. This way, Google Flights can still link directly to airlines while having saner competition for flight aggregators.