Google has rolled out its Digital Markets Act changes in Europe and called it the "largest reduction in quality" in the life of Google Search. "The changes mark the largest reduction in quality of service at the world's most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history," Google official told Reuters.
It seems this is specific to the vertical search services (VSS) and not the site reputation abuse policy EEU change from last week. Reuters wrote:
"Google said it sees that in reality the changes favor price comparison sites, also known as vertical search services (VSS), linked to sectors including hotels, airlines and restaurants, such as Expedia or http://Booking.com. They get more prominence in search results over companies in those sectors that are listed with just a link to their websites, telephone numbers and address.""The revamped search results will highlight one specialized search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details while a carousel of hotels, airlines and restaurants for example will sit below them with key features such as real-time prices stripped out. The rankings will be determined by Google's algorithm."
Google tested this in 2024 and provided these results, but the European Commission did not care. Google wrote then:
- People were measurably less satisfied with their search results and it took them longer to find hotels, including by having to do more searches. More people also gave up and did not find what they were looking for.
- Overall, traffic to hotels and intermediary sites went down.
- Hotels lost the most traffic (more than 10%), affecting hundreds of thousands of European hotels.
- Traffic to intermediary sites largely stayed flat.
We covered the Google Search DMA changes a lot here, so check out those archives.
This is just a big statement from Google, "largest reduction in quality" in its 29 year history.
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