Google said it will continue to modify the way it shows search results in Europe after facing constant criticism for its failure to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the EU.

The company says it will be running a "short test" of plain "blue link" style search results for hotel queries in three EU markets - Belgium, Estonia and Germany - that will be similar to the company's original search engine display.

This flagship market contestability reform of the EU comes with severe consequences of up to 10% global annual turnover (for repeat offenses). Alphabet, Google's parent company, has been under investigation since March over new rich features it introduced as a response to the DMA, but which opponents argue undercut the regulation's ban on self preferencing.

Travel comparison sites are among those that have kept complaining that Google is trying to bypass its obligations.

Google has fought back by claiming the changes to search have penalised other players in the travel ecosystem. In a new blog post on Tuesday — attributed to Oliver Bethell, director, legal, Google — it suggests that "direct booking clicks" to airlines, hotel operators and small retailers have dropped by around a third (30%).

The tech giant seems to be trying a 'divide and conquer' strategy in response to the DMA, which would use compliance changes to play its main rivals, "large online travel aggregators," against other travel retailers that its search engine has the power to uplift or degrade based on how much traffic it sends them.

Ironically, the DMA is an effort to stop gatekeepers from throwing their weight around the market in a way that's unfair, so it will be interesting to see what the European Commission makes of this tactic.

Changes that the new search results display suggested by Google will affect more than just the travel vertical, however, and restaurants and product searches are also affected, according to the company's blog post.

We believe that this latest draft best strikes the balance of the competing trade-offs the DMA requires," it writes, saying it "still hopes to be in a position to agree on a solution that complies with the law and continues to provide European users and businesses with access to useful technology".

Rival display units
The changes the company says in the blog post announced today include showing what it says will be "expanded and similarly formatted" units in search results when users search for products, restaurants, flights or hotels that will let people choose between results that take them to Google rivals - comparison sites, meta search engines, review sites, etc. - or results that take them directly to supplier or retailer websites.

Much will depend on how Google makes this available, but the blog post provides no visual examples. Furthermore, the blog post states it will introduce "other new formats that allow comparison sites and suppliers to show more information about what is on their websites, like prices and pictures". Again, no visual examples are provided.

Finally, Google says it will introduce new ad units for comparison sites. But, again, we will have to wait to see what these look like.

A major criticism of travel aggregators of Google's initial DMA response was that the company was switching from unfairly competing with them by placing its own comparison services in eye-catching box-outs directly at the top of search results to unfairly competing with them by baking comparison site-style features into the top of search results and using a suite of new platform features to try to keep users in Google by discouraging them from clicking away to rival services.

Google's response has been to assert it's being bullied into degrading the quality of the search experience it can provide Europeans by making it less useful. Bethell follows on that attack line in the blog post, and also suggests the DMA is preventing Google from "innovating and competing".

Complaints have persisted, however. Travel aggregators are also not pleased over the rich features Google now serves up in response to hotel search queries - which includes a map view of hotels in a desired location, along with pricing information and links to featured hotels websites.

The visually rich feature appears to be designed to drive search traffic direct to suppliers (in this case, hotels) — which could leave comparison sites out in the cold.

While many stakeholders are content with our changes, some sites continue to demand more, such as a complete ban on anything that's more sophisticated than a simple blue link to a website. This would prevent Google from showing people useful information like prices and ratings," Bethell continues — setting up the announcement of the aforementioned "blue link" test.

'Reluctant' return of blue links
This is not being framed as a DMA change Google wants to make. On the contrary, it's dubbed a "short test" so it can "understand how such changes would impact both the user experience and traffic to websites".

"The test will remove some of the features that have been at the focus of the debate, including the map that shows where hotels are and hotel results underneath it. Instead, we will show a list of individual links to websites without any of the additional features — similar to our old 'ten blue links' format from years ago," it adds.

Google says it's "very reluctant" to run the test at all, implying it believes it's being forced to this pass — and forced to degrade the quality of search for EU users — by rivals demanding it wind back the product experience to an earlier internet epoch. (Albeit, web users tired of Google's endlessly self-serving reshaping of search results might welcome the return of a few plain blue links, TBH.)

It's unclear how long the test will last, but Google tells me that hotel search results will revert to "normal"—whatever normal means in this shape-shifting context—once this exercise in gathering data is over.

Ultimately, though, that will be up to the European Commission's DMA enforcers to decide what compliance looks like.

We reached out to the Commission for a response to Google’s announcement. “All we can say is that we’re currently assessing Google’s compliance proposals,” EU spokeswoman, Lea Zuber, responded.

Google is not only under pressure over this element of its DMA compliance. Last week privacy-focused search rival DuckDuckGo urged the Commission to broaden its probe of the tech giant — accusing it of failing to give appropriate "click and query" data to rivals; and doubling down on its complaint that choice screens the DMA requires Google to show are not working as it claims they do not currently make it easy enough to switch away from Google's products.