Key Takeaways
- Google is tweaking its search results in the EU to comply with the Digital Markets Act and avoid favoring its own services.
- It has introduced new ad formats that aim to support smaller businesses like airlines and hotel operators.
- In some countries, Google is testing search results without maps or curated hotel info for broad queries.
Google has frequently been the target of regulators due to the dominance of its Search product, and things have gotten even worse for the company after the EU passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The law, aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech, prohibits Google from favoring its own products and services on its platform. As a result, Google has made more than 20 modifications to Search, but its competitors believe these changes need to go further. Now, Google is making additional changes to how it displays search results in the EU.
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Starting as early as next year
Google recently shared in a blog post that it’s making updates to better support airlines, hotel operators, and small retailers — not just the big online travel platforms. These changes include new, evenly formatted ad units that let users choose whether they want to be directed to a comparison site or go straight to a supplier’s website when searching for things like products, restaurants, flights, or hotels.
There are also new formats that let comparison sites and suppliers show more details, like prices and images, from their websites. The blog post didn’t offer any visual examples, so we’ll have to wait to see what these look like.
Google is testing ‘blue link’ results in some countries
Google says some sites still aren’t happy and want to ban anything fancier than a basic blue link to a website. Google argues this would make search results worse, so it’s running a test in Germany, Belgium, and Estonia to prove its point. The test strips out the map, the curated hotel results under it, hotel property info, and other details from Google Search.
Since November 25, users in these countries haven’t been seeing these features. That said, if someone searches for a specific hotel instead of something broad like “hotels in Germany,” some features will still show up.
