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To comply with looming rules that ban tech giants from favoring their own services, Google has been testing new look search results for flights, trains, hotels, restaurants, and products in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is supposed to help smaller companies get more traffic from Google, but reviews service Yelp says that when it tested Google’s design tweaks with consumers it had the opposite effect—making people less likely to click through to Yelp or another Google competitor.
The results, which Yelp shared with European regulators in December and WIRED this month, put some numerical backing behind complaints from Google rivals in travel, shopping, and hospitality that its efforts to comply with the DMA are insufficient—and potentially more harmful than the status quo. Yelp and thousands of others have been demanding that the EU hold a firm line against the giant companies including Apple and Amazon that are subject to what’s widely considered the world’s strictest antitrust law, violations of which can draw fines of up to 10 percent of global annual sales.
“All the gatekeepers are trying to hold on as long as possible to the status quo and make the new world unattractive,” says Richard Stables, CEO of shopping comparison site Kelkoo, which is unhappy with how Google has tweaked shopping results to comply with the DMA. “That’s really the game plan.”
Google spokesperson Rory O'Donoghue says the more than 20 changes made to search in response to the DMA are providing more opportunities for services such as Yelp to show up in results. “To suggest otherwise is plain wrong,” he says. Overall, Google’s tests of various DMA-inspired designs show clicks to review and comparison websites are up, O'Donoghue says—at the cost of users losing shortcuts to Google tools and individual businesses like airlines and restaurants facing a drop in visits from Google search. “We've been seeking feedback from a range of stakeholders over many months as we try to balance the needs of different types of websites while complying with the law,” he says.
Google, which generates 30 percent of its sales from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, views the DMA as disrespecting its expertise in what users want. Critics such as Yelp argue that Google sometimes siphons users away from the more reliable content they offer. Yelp competes with Google for advertisers but generated less than 1 percent of its record sales of $1.3 billion last year from outside the US. An increase in European traffic could significantly boost its business.
To study search changes, Yelp worked with user-research company Lyssna to watch how hundreds of consumers from around the world interacted with Google’s new EU search results page when asked to find a dinner spot in Paris. For searches like that or for other “local” businesses, as Google calls them, one new design features results from Google Maps data at the top of the page below the search bar but adds a new box widget lower down containing images from and links to reviews websites like Yelp.
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The experiments found that about 73 percent of about 500 people using that new design clicked results that kept them inside Google’s ecosystem—an increase over the 55 percent who did so when the design Google is phasing out in Europe was tested with a smaller pool of roughly 250 people.
Yelp also tested a variation of the new design. In this version, which Google has shared with regulators, the new box featuring review websites is placed above the maps widget. It was more successful in drawing people to try alternatives to Google, with only about 44 percent of consumers in the experiment sticking with the search giant. Though O'Donoghue says the box and widget will be treated equally by Google’s search algorithms, the order the features appear in will vary based on those calculations. Yelp’s concern is that Google will win out too often.
Yelp proposed to EU regulators that to produce more fair outcomes, Google should instead amend the map widget on results pages to show business listings and ratings from numerous providers including Google's directory, Yelp, or others based on how the search algorithms rank them.
Companies such as Yelp that are critical of the changes in testing have called on the European Commission to immediately open an investigation into Google on March 7, when enforcement of the DMA begins.
“Yelp urges regulators to compel Google to fully comply with both the letter and spirit of the DMA,” says Yelp’s vice president of public policy, David Segal. “Google will soon be in violation of both, because if you look at what Google has put forth, it’s pretty clear that its services still have the best real estate.”
EU officials say that not everything they’ve seen seems up to standard, but they can’t get more specific until March 7. They’re well aware of Yelp’s concerns, says Gerard de Graaf, head of the EU’s San Francisco office. “The commission will vigorously enforce the DMA to ensure it will deliver the full benefits of market opening and greater opportunities for innovation and will make full use of enforcement measures as necessary,” he says.
This isn’t the first time that Google or other major platforms—termed “gatekeepers” by the DMA—have been accused of proposing tweaks that evade the spirit of the EU’s new rules.
Other Google units affected by the law, such as Android, Chrome, and Maps, and its fellow gatekeepers such as Apple, Meta, and Amazon, haven’t yet publicized all of their compliance plans. But a coalition of thousands of smaller companies, including encrypted software maker Proton and Norwegian media company Schibsted, has contended that those disclosed so far are falling short. The group wrote that next month is supposed to kick off a new era on the internet, at least for Europeans: “It would be regrettable if that new era began with a false start.”
Fair Play
The DMA provision that strikes at Google’s search business is intended to prevent websites that compete with some of its more specific search tools from getting unfairly demoted in search results. Not only Yelp is critical of Google’s proposed fixes.
The new rules also require Google to treat search results for services similar to Google Hotels, Google Flights, and Google Shopping in a fair, transparent, and nondiscriminatory manner. Flight comparison competitors like Skyscanner have been frustrated by how queries like “London-Paris flights” give as a first result a Google Flights widget with airlines, prices, and schedules—a much richer and more prominent interface than the standard links to Skyscanner and other flight comparison sites lower down the page, though Google is beginning to add options for them to be more visually appealing.
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Google is testing a new design in Europe that replaces the Google Flights widget with a more compact listing of options lower down the page that links to airlines rather than Google Flights. The effect of those changes on user behavior is unclear; Google hasn’t published any data.
Annalaura Gallo, a spokesperson for the EU Travel Tech Alliance, which represents Skyscanner, Airbnb, Expedia, and several others, says it hasn’t done any user research studies, because the design is blatantly out of step with the DMA. “From our perspective, this is already illegal,” she says, pointing to how the new listing is still a distinctive feature on Google’s redesigned results page. “They need to treat everyone the same.”
Stables of Kelkoo says Google’s proposed changes for shopping searches, which include a new “Compare offers” button, are also problematic, because Google Shopping results still capture most of the real estate. “Consumers like convenience, but not at the expense of choice, because that creates monopolies and high prices,” he says.
One change Google is testing across various types of searches is using the buttons called “chips” that appear directly below the search bar on a results page to highlight comparison services. Users can click on chips labeled “Places sites,” “Jobs sites,” “Flight sites,” “Product sites,” “Transport sites,” and more to refresh the results to show services such as Yelp, Skyscanner, LinkedIn, and TripAdvisor more prominently.
Google may still be working out the kinks. A chip for “Job sites” appeared on a recent search for “earthquake,” says Malte Landwehr, who works at product search website Idealo trying to help it rank higher in search results. Idealo hasn’t done any consumer testing on the chips, but he doesn’t expect them to change how Google’s results pages tend to steer users toward its own services.
Updated 2-23-2024, 4:30 pm EST: This article was updated to clarify Yelp's proposal to EU regulators.
