In a bid to avoid paying a hefty fine in the EU, Google has agreed to make changes to search. However, the company isn’t particularly thrilled by it. In fact, they made a somewhat veiled threat that this could degrade the Google Search experience for users in Europe.
Google Search changes could degrade experience in Europe
According to an exclusive report from Reuters, Google will be rolling out changes in the EU to satisfy antitrust regulators. However, the company believes that as a result of these changes, users in Europe could wake up to a degradation in Google Search services.
For those unfamiliar, Google was facing a hefty $1 billion fine in the EU for allegedly favoring its own services over the competition. If you’ve searched for flights and hotels on Google before, you know that Google usually presents you its own services. The idea, at least on paper, is to allow users to make their bookings quicker. This is versus navigating to different websites.
However, as a result of this, many companies are alleging that they are losing out on business because of how prominent Google places its own services in search. And let’s be honest, how many of you get what you need from AI Overviews or AI Mode and never bother clicking further than that? That’s a lot of traffic lost right there. So it is understandable that many of these operators are upset.
So what changes?
Now that Google is rolling out these changes, exactly how will users be affected? Or what kind of changes can users in Europe expect? According to the Reuters report, Google’s revised search results will now highlight one specialized search engine at the top of the page. It will be followed by two others with fewer details.
Then, users can also expect to see a carousel of hotels, airlines, and restaurants. However, real-time prices will be stripped out. This should give competing websites a better chance of landing the business of users who search, instead of users clicking on Google’s own services right away.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use Google Flights if that’s your preferred service. It’s just that it won’t be as prominent anymore. You can still navigate over manually if you prefer. That being said, Reuters notes that the rankings of these websites are determined by Google’s algorithm.
This means that to a very big extent, Google still more or less controls what you see. So make what you will of that.
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