Google says EU search overhaul will hurt users and local businesses

Alphabet’s Google began rolling out changes to its European search results on Tuesday to satisfy EU antitrust regulators, saying the result will degrade the experience for users and raise costs for European businesses, per Reuters.

A Google official said the changes represent the largest reduction in quality of service in the search engine’s 29-year history.

“These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans,” said Nick Fox, the company’s senior vice president for knowledge and information, adding that they boost online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses and strip out features people use daily.

Users outside the EU are unaffected.

Comparison sites move up as local businesses lose search features

The redesign changes who appears where. One specialised search service sits at the top of the page, with two more beneath it carrying less detail, and below those a carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants with features including real-time pricing removed.

The company states that the Commission has framed this decision on the grounds that it was “leveling the playing field” for advertisers; however, in practice, the result is that it gives an advantage to price-comparison sites, or vertical search engines, for hotel, flights, and restaurant advertising. It named Expedia and Booking.com.

Those sites now receive more prominence than the businesses in the same sectors, which are listed with a link to their website, a telephone number and an address.

Google says the changes hurt users, but its evidence remains private

Three main arguments form the basis of Google’s case. According to the firm, previous compliance with the DMA decreased free direct booking traffic for European companies by 30%. However, Google has yet to provide the data or clarify which time period it referred to.

Testing the new layout with millions of European users found high dissatisfaction, with people retyping queries, though the methodology is not public.

And this is the biggest quality drop in the search engine’s 29-year history, a claim Reuters attributed to a Google official it did not name. Nick Fox, the only executive who spoke on the record, did not go that far.

Google has been making this argument for months. As Cryptopolitan reported in July, the company was already calling its earlier DMA changes “the biggest downgrade in the product’s history,” having used near-identical wording in May.

Nobody outside the company can check any of it, The Next Web noted, and Google both built the interface and is assessing it. The company has used its own test results in this fight before. It ran a “blue links” experiment in Europe in 2024, stripping search results back, then cited the outcome in its lobbying against the DMA, per TechCrunch.

€890 million in fines put Google on a 60-day compliance clock

The European Commission fined Google €460 million, about $534 million, in July for favouring its own services in shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, alongside a separate €430 million penalty over Google Play restrictions.

The EC granted Google a period of 60 days within which it could either comply or incur periodic fines ranging from 5% of the total worldwide turnover, this being measured per period rather than one-off. Google’s aggregate EU antitrust fines currently amount to €10.38 billion.

President Donald Trump responded to the July fines by threatening an investigation into what he called the bloc’s robbing of American companies.

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