Google has announced a search engine update for European users: what will change

Google will change the way it displays search results in Europe. The reason for this was complaints from smaller businesses in the European Union. Representatives of the hotel industry, airlines and online retailers complained about a decrease in traffic to their websites after the latest updates, with some seeing a third drop in the number of clicks.

In order to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act and avoid the threat of a huge fine, Google has to take into account the wishes of smaller competitors in its search results updates. What exactly will change and why, Reuters tells.

According to the publication, Alphabet was forced to plan changes in Google Search results in Europe after complaints from smaller competitors about the decline in traffic to hotel and airline websites, as well as small sales resources and price comparison sites. They complained that the number of clicks on their products fell by 30% after the latest updates.

This comes amid an investigation by the European Commission into whether Google is violating EU technical rules, in particular the EU Digital Services Act (DMA). According to its requirements, Google is prohibited from favoring its own products and services on its platform.

The investigation has been ongoing since March. The EC is trying to establish whether Google favors its vertical search engines (such as Google Shopping, Google Flights, and Google Hotels) over competitors and whether it discriminates against third-party services in Google's search results. Representatives of small companies filed complaints that Alphabet Google does not fully comply with the EU Digital Markets Act, which aims to create a level playing field for large corporations and their smaller competitors and reduce monopolies of big business.

For violating the DMA, the offending company may face a fine of up to 10% of its annual global turnover.

"We have therefore proposed additional changes to our European search results to try to meet these requests, while at the same time achieving the goals set by the DMA," said Google's legal director Oliver Bethell.

The planned changes include the introduction of expanded and uniformly formatted blocks that allow users to choose between comparison sites and vendor websites, new formats that allow competitors to display prices and images on their websites, and new ad units for comparison sites.

"We believe that the latest proposal is the right way to balance the difficult trade-offs that the DMA involves," Bethell emphasized.

At the same time, users of the search engine in Germany, Belgium and Estonia will not see a map with the hotel location. Google has also decided to return to the "ten blue links" format of search results. The latter innovation will be tested to see if users are interested in it.

"We are very reluctant to take this step, as removing useful features will not benefit either consumers or businesses in Europe," Bethell said.

Currently, these proposals are being evaluated by the European Commission to determine whether they meet the existing requirements.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA reported that Google Gemini started to memorize users' interests and how the work with artificial intelligence has changed.

It was also reported that the Kremlin TV channels demanded 2 undecillion rubles from Google (a figure with 36 zeros). The channels in question are Channel One, VDTRK, RT, Sputnik, NTV, Zvezda, and those owned by RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan. The blocking took place due to the media content's violation of sanctions restrictions and YouTube's policy on the dissemination of disinformation and propaganda.

Since the beginning of the blocking of Russian propaganda channels on YouTube, Russian pro-government media have been actively applying to the courts, demanding that Google restore access to the blocked accounts.

The astronomical amount of Russian propagandists' claims against the American corporation emerged after a Russian court ruled in 2023 to force Google to restore access to the channels within 9 months with the prospect of a daily fine of 100,000 rubles for non-compliance with the court decision. The Russian "Themis" also decided that the amount of progressive fines would double every week without a maximum amount limit, allowing it to grow to enormous values.

Meanwhile, Google continues to defend itself in international courts, denying that Russian law has the right to impose such sanctions.

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