• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 26, 2024

Google said it has proposed more changes to its search results in Europe to meet Digital Markets Act (DMA) requirements.

During the past year, Google has made many changes to comply, such as significantly redesigning certain features and completely removing others in Europe. But it has not been enough to the company announced additional changes this week, more than 20.

“A number of the new rules involve difficult trade-offs that will impact people and businesses who use our products,” Oliver Bethell, director of competition at Google, wrote in a blog post.

Products that have been developed to help people get things done quickly and securely online like providing recommendations across different products will no longer work in the same, for example. Changes to products will affect publishers.

The changes include giving users the ability to choose between results that take them to comparison sites and results that take them directly to supplier websites when they are searching for products, restaurants, flights or hotels.

The introduction of dedicated units and chips to help users find comparison sites in areas such as flights, hotels and shopping are among the changes. Google has removed some features from the search results page which help consumers find businesses, such as the Google Flights unit.

New formats will allow comparison sites and suppliers to show more information about what is on their websites, including prices and images, as well as new advertising units for comparison sites.

Changes to search results may send more traffic to big intermediaries and aggregators, and less traffic to direct suppliers such as hotels, airlines, merchants and restaurants.

Google also introduced additional consents for linking Google services.

The company shares data across some Google products and services to help personalize content and ads, but users in the European Economic Area (EEA) will have the ability to visit the settings in their Google Account and choose if they want to continue to share data across Google services by linking them.

European users also may also see new consent banners asking them whether they would like to link their Google services. I imagine some of these changes will become law in the United States as the Department of Justice wraps up its monopoly case.

In Germany, Belgium and Estonia, Google plans to remove a mapping feature that shows the location of hotels -- part of a test to understand how the change would impact both the user experience and traffic to websites.