On March 05 2024, Google got around to making some changes in light of the EU’s passing their Digital Markets Act (DMA) into law. If you’re not a legal eagle, the impact of this law mainly centered around the “self-favoring” of Google in their role as digital gatekeepers.
Banning digital gatekeepers from self-favoring is one of the key objectives of the DMA. The ban specifically emphasizes that online search engines, acting as digital gatekeepers, should not give undue prominence to their own direct offerings (also known as embeddings). Online search engines are also not to index, crawl or display distinct first-party services – e.g. Google Flights when searching for flights – more prominently than alternatives offered by third-parties.
This all, on the face of it, is to encourage fair competition. In a world where Google dominates 80% of all search queries and Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE) seems to directly answer 92% of all brand and product-related queries, it’s a timely piece of legislation. And clearly one Big G couldn’t ignore.
In Germany, particularly, this legal challenge coupled with the deprecation of third party cookies has been described by the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “impacting the future of the free internet”.
While more changes are expected to come as the impact of the DMA takes hold, there have been some changes already, notably in Flights and Hotel listings.
Here are a few of the changes, in brief:
- A new rich results carousel gallery is shown for some pages.
- The hotel local pack no longer links to Google Hotels. The GBP profile is shown instead.
- A lot of results from Google Books.
- Places Sites module replaces find results module
Research courtesy of @Lluc_SEO on Twitter/X
How far will the fairness changes go?
It’s unlikely, in my opinion, the changes will stop here, especially when prominent anti-trust lawyers like Philipp Westerhoff are still pressing Google in EU courts to comply fully with the DMA.
Very possible that most of the ‘in-search’ answers to user queries will come into focus, especially when those first-party answers infringe on the answers given by sites listed on Google. It’s long been a problem for a lot of publishers, insofar as ever knowing how much Google is going to infringe on the content on their site and simply show it on Google.com instead.
Things like Google showing calculators when you search ‘calculator’, or even those COVID statistics that Google took the reins of at the height of the pandemic, much to Worldometer.info’s dismay. Overall, it throws into sharp relief just how much Google has spread out horizontally. A search engine is a means to find answers, yet right now it’s also an answer-generating machine itself. How long can both of those things be true with the DMA? Time will tell.
Title Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
With more than 20 years of publishing experience and formal study to an MA level, Adam is an expert in digital publishing strategies. Adam is the founder and lead consultant at Alphamorr, where he helps digital publishers and media groups to set and achieve their goals. Adam’s experience includes leading sales team in fast-growing organizations covering Adtech for some of the largest websites in the world & enterprise software deployed with world-leading organizations, both public and private.
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