You are jumping to conclusions about limitations of the service. As far as I can see there's no requirement that the process is completed "inside a tiny window". For the flight, you could have it show date selectors and select where to fly to and from, and bring the user straight to a list of flights on the normal website, for example, rather than make them complete the whole thing in a little box.
So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first booking/search step on third party sites.
How would that suck compared to just getting a text snippet and have to click through to a separate web site to even start the search process?
> As far as I can see there's no requirement that the process is completed "inside a tiny window"
Sure. I was referring to initial input form only. It's limited. Both, in space it can use (I hope Yandex won't let those widgets be huge), and in interactivity, like drawing complex HTML right away, without pressing "submit" (both, Yandex and Google would agree that it's a nice feature :) ((I saw that there are a lot of features, like interactivity are possible, but it's still not good old HTML+JS))
> So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first booking/search step on third party sites.
Well, you're absolutely right in this statement. For some reason, I'd be rather annoyed by these forms, and wouldn't trust them (same reasons: limited functionality and UI space).
Of course, let's all see how Yandex proves I'm wrong and they came up with great know-how!
So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first booking/search step on third party sites.
How would that suck compared to just getting a text snippet and have to click through to a separate web site to even start the search process?