NotebookLM is undoubtedly one of Google’s best implementations of generative AI technology, giving you the ability to explore documents and notes with a Gemini AI model. Last year, Google added the ability to generate so-called “audio overviews” of your source material in NotebookLM. Now, Google has brought those fake AI podcasts to search results as a test. Instead of clicking links or reading the AI Overview, you can have two nonexistent people tell you what the results say.
This feature is not currently rolling out widely—it’s available in search labs, which means you have to manually enable it. Anyone can opt in to the new Audio Overview search experience, though. If you join the test, you’ll quickly see the embedded player in Google search results. However, it’s not at the top with the usual block of AI-generated text. Instead, you’ll see it after the first few search results, below the “People also ask” knowledge graph section.
Credit: Google
Google isn’t wasting resources to generate the audio automatically, so you have to click the generate button to get started. A few seconds later, you’re given a back-and-forth conversation between two AI voices summarizing the search results. The player includes a list of sources from which the overview is built, as well as the option to speed up or slow down playback.
When major events occur, most people rush to Google to find information. Increasingly, the first thing they see is an AI Overview, a feature that already has a reputation for making glaring mistakes. In the wake of a tragic plane crash in India, Google’s AI search results are spreading misinformation claiming the incident involved an Airbus plane—it was actually a Boeing 787.
Travelers are more attuned to the airliner models these days after a spate of crashes involving Boeing’s 737 lineup several years ago. Searches for airline disasters are sure to skyrocket in the coming days, with reports that more than 200 passengers and crew lost their lives in the Air India Flight 171 crash. The way generative AI operates means some people searching for details may get the wrong impression from Google’s results page.
Not all searches get AI answers, but Google has been steadily expanding this feature since it debuted last year. One searcher on Reddit spotted a troubling confabulation when searching for crashes involving Airbus planes. AI Overviews, apparently overwhelmed with results reporting on the Air India crash, stated confidently (and incorrectly) that it was an Airbus A330 that fell out of the sky shortly after takeoff. We’ve run a few similar searches—some of the AI results say Boeing, some say Airbus, and some include a strange mashup of both Airbus and Boeing. It’s a mess.
In this search, Google’s AI says the crash involved an Airbus A330 instead of a Boeing 787.
Credit: /u/stuckintrraffic
In this search, Google’s AI says the crash involved an Airbus A330 instead of a Boeing 787. Credit: /u/stuckintrraffic
But why is Google bringing up the Air India crash at all in the context of Airbus? Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict if you’ll get an AI Overview that blames Boeing or Airbus—generative AI is non-deterministic, meaning the output is different every time, even for identical inputs. Our best guess for the underlying cause is that numerous articles on the Air India crash mention Airbus as Boeing’s main competitor. AI Overviews is essentially summarizing these results, and the AI goes down the wrong path because it lacks the ability to understand what is true.
Google has shaped the Internet as we know it, and unleashing its index could change everything.
Google may be forced to license its search technology when the final antitrust ruling comes down. Credit: Aurich Lawson
Google may be forced to license its search technology when the final antitrust ruling comes down. Credit: Aurich Lawson
Google wasn’t around for the advent of the World Wide Web, but it successfully remade the web on its own terms. Today, any website that wants to be findable has to play by Google’s rules, and after years of search dominance, the company has lost a major antitrust case that could reshape both it and the web.
The closing arguments in the case just wrapped up last week, and Google could be facing serious consequences when the ruling comes down in August. Losing Chrome would certainly change things for Google, but the Department of Justice is pursuing other remedies that could have even more lasting impacts. During his testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai seemed genuinely alarmed at the prospect of being forced to license Google’s search index and algorithm, the so-called data remedies in the case. He claimed this would be no better than a spinoff of Google Search. The company’s statements have sometimes derisively referred to this process as “white labeling” Google Search.
But does a white label Google Search sound so bad? Google has built an unrivaled index of the web, but the way it shows results has become increasingly frustrating. A handful of smaller players in search have tried to offer alternatives to Google’s search tools. They all have different approaches to retrieving information for you, but they agree that spinning off Google Search could change the web again. Whether or not those changes are positive depends on who you ask.
The Internet is big and noisy
As Google’s search results have changed over the years, more people have been open to other options. Some have simply moved to AI chatbots to answer their questions, hallucinations be damned. But for most people, it’s still about the 10 blue links (for now).
Because of the scale of the Internet, there are only three general web search indexes: Google, Bing, and Brave. Every search product (including AI tools) relies on one or more of these indexes to probe the web. But what does that mean?
“Generally, a search index is a service that, when given a query, is able to find relevant documents published on the Internet,” said Brave’s search head Josep Pujol.
A search index is essentially a big database, and that’s not the same as search results. According to JP Schmetz, Brave’s chief of ads, it’s entirely possible to have the best and most complete search index in the world and still show poor results for a given query. Sound like anyone you know?
Google’s technological lead has allowed it to crawl more websites than anyone else. It has all the important parts of the web, plus niche sites, abandoned blogs, sketchy copies of legitimate websites, copies of those copies, and AI-rephrased copies of the copied copies—basically everything. And the result of this Herculean digital inventory is a search experience that feels increasingly discombobulated.
“Google is running large-scale experiments in ways that no rival can because we’re effectively blinded,” said Kamyl Bazbaz, head of public affairs at DuckDuckGo, which uses the Bing index. “Google’s scale advantage fuels a powerful feedback loop of different network effects that ensure a perpetual scale and quality deficit for rivals that locks in Google’s advantage.”
The size of the index may not be the only factor that matters, though. Brave, which is perhaps best known for its browser, also has a search engine. Brave Search is the default in its browser, but you can also just go to the URL in your current browser. Unlike most other search engines, Brave doesn’t need to go to anyone else for results. Pujol suggested that Brave doesn’t need the scale of Google’s index to find what you need. And admittedly, Brave’s search results don’t feel meaningfully worse than Google’s—they may even be better when you consider the way that Google tries to keep you from clicking.
Brave’s index spans around 25 billion pages, but it leaves plenty of the web uncrawled. “We could be indexing five to 10 times more pages, but we choose not to because not all the web has signal. Most web pages are basically noise,” said Pujol.
The freemium search engine Kagi isn’t worried about having the most comprehensive index. Kagi is a meta search engine. It pulls in data from multiple indexes, like Bing and Brave, but it has a custom index of what founder and CEO Vladimir Prelovac calls the “non-commercial web.”
When you search with Kagi, some of the results (it tells you the proportion) come from its custom index of personal blogs, hobbyist sites, and other content that is poorly represented on other search engines. It’s reminiscent of the days when huge brands weren’t always clustered at the top of Google—but even these results are being pushed out of reach in favor of AI, ads, Knowledge Graph content, and other Google widgets. That’s a big part of why Kagi exists, according to Prelovac.
A Google spinoff could change everything
We’ve all noticed the changes in Google’s approach to search, and most would agree that they have made finding reliable and accurate information harder. Regardless, Google’s incredibly deep and broad index of the Internet is in demand.
Even with Bing and Brave available, companies are going to extremes to syndicate Google Search results. A cottage industry has emerged to scrape Google searches as a stand-in for an official index. These companies are violating Google’s terms, yet they appear in Google Search results themselves. Google could surely do something about this if it wanted to.
The DOJ calls Google’s mountain of data the “essential raw material” for building a general search engine, and it believes forcing the firm to license that material is key to breaking its monopoly. The sketchy syndication firms will evaporate if the DOJ’s data remedies are implemented, which would give competitors an official way to utilize Google’s index. And utilize it they will.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai decried the court’s efforts to force a “de facto divestiture” of Google’s search tech.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Google CEO Sundar Pichai decried the court’s efforts to force a “de facto divestiture” of Google’s search tech. Credit: Ryan Whitwam
According to Prelovac, this could lead to an explosion in search choices. “The whole purpose of the Sherman Act is to proliferate a healthy, competitive marketplace. Once you have access to a search index, then you can have thousands of search startups,” said Prelovac.
The Kagi founder suggested that licensing Google Search could allow entities of all sizes to have genuinely useful custom search tools. Cities could use the data to create deep, hyper-local search, and people who love cats could make a cat-specific search engine, in both cases pulling what they want from the most complete database of online content. And, of course, general search products like Kagi would be able to license Google’s tech for a “nominal fee,” as the DOJ puts it.
Prelovac didn’t hesitate when asked if Kagi, which offers a limited number of free searches before asking users to subscribe, would integrate Google’s index. “Yes, that is something we would do,” he said. “And that’s what I believe should happen.”
There may be some drawbacks to unleashing Google’s search services. Judge Amit Mehta has expressed concern that blocking Google’s search placement deals could reduce browser choice, and there is a similar issue with the data remedies. If Google is forced to license search as an API, its few competitors in web indexing could struggle to remain afloat. In a roundabout way, giving away Google’s search tech could actually increase its influence.
The Brave team worries about how open access to Google’s search technology could impact diversity on the web. “If implemented naively, it’s a big problem,” said Brave’s ad chief JP Schmetz, “If the court forces Google to provide search at a marginal cost, it will not be possible for Bing or Brave to survive until the remedy ends.”
The landscape of AI-based search could also change. We know from testimony given during the remedy trial by OpenAI’s Nick Turley that the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to get access to Google Search to ground its AI models—it currently uses Bing. If Google were suddenly an option, you can be sure OpenAI and others would rush to connect Google’s web data to their large language models (LLMs).
The attempt to reduce Google’s power could actually grant it new monopolies in AI, according to Brave Chief Business Officer Brian Brown. “All of a sudden, you would have a single monolithic voice of truth across all the LLMs, across all the web,” Brown said.
What if you weren’t the product?
If white labeling Google does expand choice, even at the expense of other indexes, it will give more kinds of search products a chance in the market—maybe even some that shun Google’s focus on advertising. You don’t see much of that right now.
For most people, web search is and always has been a free service supported by ads. Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Bing offer all the search queries you want for free because they want eyeballs. It’s been said often, but it’s true: If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. This is an arrangement that bothers Kagi’s founder.
“For something as important as information consumption, there should not be an intermediary between me and the information, especially one that is trying to sell me something,” said Prelovac.
Kagi search results acknowledge the negative impact of today’s advertising regime. Kagi users see a warning next to results with a high number of ads and trackers. According to Prelovac, that is by far the strongest indication that a result is of low quality. That icon also lets you adjust the prevalence of such sites in your personal results. You can demote a site or completely hide it, which is a valuable option in the age of clickbait.
Kagi search gives you a lot of control.
Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Kagi search gives you a lot of control. Credit: Ryan Whitwam
Kagi’s paid approach to search changes its relationship with your data. “We literally don’t need user data,” Prelovac said. “But it’s not only that we don’t need it. It’s a liability.”
Prelovac admitted that getting people to pay for search is “really hard.” Nevertheless, he believes ad-supported search is a dead end. So Kagi is planning for a future in five or 10 years when more people have realized they’re still “paying” for ad-based search with lost productivity time and personal data, he said.
We know how Google handles user data (it collects a lot of it), but what does that mean for smaller search engines like Brave and DuckDuckGo that rely on ads?
“I’m sure they mean well,” said Prelovac.
Brave said that it shields user data from advertisers, relying on first-party tracking to attribute clicks to Brave without touching the user. “They cannot retarget people later; none of that is happening,” said Brave’s JP Schmetz.
DuckDuckGo is a bit of an odd duck—it relies on Bing’s general search index, but it adds a layer of privacy tools on top. It’s free and ad-supported like Google and Brave, but the company says it takes user privacy seriously.
“Viewing ads is privacy protected by DuckDuckGo, and most ad clicks are managed by Microsoft’s ad network,” DuckDuckGo’s Kamyl Bazbaz said. He explained that DuckDuckGo has worked with Microsoft to ensure its network does not track users or create any profiles based on clicks. He added that the company has a similar privacy arrangement with TripAdvisor for travel-related ads.
It’s AI all the way down
We can’t talk about the future of search without acknowledging the artificially intelligent elephant in the room. As Google continues its shift to AI-based search, it’s tempting to think of the potential search spin-off as a way to escape that trend. However, you may find few refuges in the coming years. There’s a real possibility that search is evolving beyond the 10 blue links and toward an AI assistant model.
All non-Google search engines have AI integrations, with the most prominent being Microsoft Bing, which has a partnership with OpenAI. But smaller players have AI search features, too. The folks working on these products agree with Microsoft and Google on one important point: They see AI as inevitable.
Today’s Google alternatives all have their own take on AI Overviews, which generates responses to queries based on search results. They’re generally not as in-your-face as Google AI, though. While Google and Microsoft are intensely focused on increasing the usage of AI search, other search operators aren’t pushing for that future. They are along for the ride, though.
AI Overviews are integrated with Google’s search results, and most other players have their own version.
Credit: Google
AI Overviews are integrated with Google’s search results, and most other players have their own version. Credit: Google
“We’re finding that some people prefer to start in chat mode and then jump into more traditional search results when needed, while others prefer the opposite,” Bazbaz said. “So we thought the best thing to do was offer both. We made it easy to move between them, and we included an off switch for those who’d like to avoid AI altogether.”
The team at Brave views AI as a core means of accessing search and one that will continue to grow. Brave generates AI answers for many searches and prominently cites sources. You can also disable Brave’s AI if you prefer. But according to search chief Josep Pujol, the move to AI search is inevitable for a pretty simple reason: It’s convenient, and people will always choose convenience. So AI is changing the web as we know it, for better or worse, because LLMs can save a smidge of time, especially for more detailed “long-tail” queries. These AI features may give you false information while they do it, but that’s not always apparent.
This is very similar to the language Google uses when discussing agentic search, although it expresses it in a more nuanced way. By understanding the task behind a query, Google hopes to provide AI answers that save people time, even if the model needs a few ticks to fan out and run multiple searches to generate a more comprehensive report on a topic. That’s probably still faster than running multiple searches and manually reviewing the results, and it could leave traditional search as an increasingly niche service, even in a world with more choices.
“Will the 10 blue links continue to exist in 10 years?” Pujol asked. “Actually, one question would be, does it even exist now? In 10 years, [search] will have evolved into more of an AI conversation behavior or even agentic. That is probably the case. What, for sure, will continue to exist is the need to search. Search is a verb, an action that you do, and whether you will do it directly or whether it will be done through an agent, it’s a search engine.”
Vlad from Kagi sees AI becoming the default way we access information in the long term, but his search engine doesn’t force you to use it. On Kagi, you can expand the AI box for your searches and ask follow-ups, and the AI will open automatically if you use a question mark in your search. But that’s just the start.
“You watch Star Trek, nobody’s clicking on links there—I do believe in that vision in science fiction movies,” Prelovac said. “I don’t think my daughter will be clicking links in 10 years. The only question is if the current technology will be the one that gets us there. LLMs have inherent flaws. I would even tend to say it’s likely not going to get us to Star Trek.”
If we think of AI mainly as a way to search for information, the future becomes murky. With generative AI in the driver’s seat, questions of authority and accuracy may be left to language models that often behave in unpredictable and difficult-to-understand ways. Whether we’re headed for an AI boom or bust—for continued Google dominance or a new era of choice—we’re facing fundamental changes to how we access information.
Maybe if we get those thousands of search startups, there will be a few that specialize in 10 blue links. We can only hope.
Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.
At the same time, Google is seeking to set itself apart from AI upstarts. “Generative AI companies are not trying to out-Google Google,” said Schmidtlein. Google’s team contends that its actions have not harmed any AI products like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and at any rate, they are not in the search market as defined by the court.
Mehta mused about the future of search, suggesting we may have to rethink what a general search engine is in 2025. “Maybe people don’t want 10 blue links anymore,” he said.
The Chromium problem and an elegant solution
At times during the case, Mehta has expressed skepticism about the divestment of Chrome. During closing arguments, Dahlquist reiterated the close relationship between search and browsers, reminding the court that 35 percent of Google’s search volume comes from Chrome.
Mehta now seems more receptive to a Chrome split than before, perhaps in part because the effects of the other remedies are becoming so murky. He called the Chrome divestment “less speculative” and “more elegant” than the data and placement remedies. Google again claimed, as it has throughout the remedy phase, that forcing it to give up Chrome is unsupported in the law and that Chrome’s dominance is a result of innovation.
Credit: Aurich Lawson
Even if Mehta leans toward ordering this remedy, Chromium may be a sticking point. The judge seems unconvinced that the supposed buyers—a group which apparently includes almost every major tech firm—have the scale and expertise needed to maintain Chromium. This open source project forms the foundation of many other browsers, making its continued smooth operation critical to the web.
If Google gives up Chrome, Chromium goes with it, but what about the people who maintain it? The DOJ contends that it’s common for employees to come along with an acquisition, but that’s far from certain. There was some discussion of ensuring a buyer could commit to hiring staff to maintain Chromium. The DOJ suggests Google could be ordered to provide financial incentives to ensure critical roles are filled, but that sounds potentially messy.
A Chrome sale seems more likely now than it did earlier, but nothing is assured yet. Following the final arguments from each side, it’s up to Mehta to mull over the facts before deciding Google’s fate. That’s expected to happen in August, but nothing will change for Google right away. The company has already confirmed it will appeal the case, hoping to have the original ruling overturned. It could still be years before this case reaches its ultimate conclusion.
Google’s first year with AI search was a wild ride. It will get wilder.
Google is constantly making changes to its search rankings, but not all updates are equal. Every few months, the company bundles up changes into a larger “core update.” These updates make rapid and profound changes to search, so website operators watch them closely.
The March 2024 update was unique. It was one of Google’s largest core updates ever, and it took over a month to fully roll out. Nothing has felt quite the same since. Whether the update was good or bad depends on who you ask—and maybe who you are.
It’s common for websites to see traffic changes after a core update, but the impact of the March 2024 update marked a seismic shift. Google says the update aimed to address spam and AI-generated content in a meaningful way. Still, many publishers say they saw clicks on legitimate sites evaporate, while others have had to cope with unprecedented volatility in their traffic. Because Google owns almost the entire search market, changes in its algorithm can move the Internet itself.
In hindsight, the March 2024 update looks like the first major Google algorithm update for the AI era. Not only did it (supposedly) veer away from ranking AI-authored content online, but it also laid the groundwork for Google’s ambitious—and often annoying—desire to fuse AI with search.
A year ago, this ambition surfaced with AI Overviews, but now the company is taking an even more audacious route, layering in a new chat-based answer service called “AI Mode.” Both of these technologies do at least two things: They aim to keep you on Google properties longer, and they remix publisher content without always giving prominent citations.
Smaller publishers appear to have borne the brunt of the changes caused by these updates. “Google got all this flak for crushing the small publishers, and it’s true that when they make these changes, they do crush a lot of publishers,” says Jim Yu, CEO of enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge. Yu explains that Google is the only search engine likely to surface niche content in the first place, and there are bound to be changes to sites at the fringes during a major core update.
Google’s own view on the impact of the March 2024 update is unsurprisingly positive. The company said it was hoping to reduce the appearance of unhelpful content in its search engine results pages (SERPs) by 40 percent. After the update, the company claimed an actual reduction of closer to 45 percent. But does it feel like Google’s results have improved by that much? Most people don’t think so.
What causes this disconnect? According to Michael King, founder of SEO firm iPullRank, we’re not speaking the same language as Google. “Google’s internal success metrics differ from user perceptions,” he says. “Google measures user satisfaction through quantifiable metrics, while external observers rely on subjective experiences.”
Google evaluates algorithm changes with various tests, including human search quality testers and running A/B tests on live searches. But more than anything else, success is about the total number of searches (5 trillion of them per year). Google often makes this number a centerpiece of its business updates to show investors that it can still grow.
However, using search quantity to measure quality has obvious problems. For instance, more engagement with a search engine might mean that quality has decreased, so people try new queries (e.g., the old trick of adding “Reddit” to the end of your search string). In other words, people could be searching more because they don’t like the results.
Jim Yu suggests that Google is moving fast and breaking things, but it may not be as bad as we think. “I think they rolled things out faster because they had to move a lot faster than they’ve historically had to move, and it ends up that they do make some real mistakes,” says Yu. “[Google] is held to a higher standard, but by and large, I think their search quality is improving.”
According to King, Google’s current search behavior still favors big names, but other sites have started to see a rebound. “Larger brands are performing better in the top three positions, while lesser-known websites have gained ground in positions 4 through 10,” says King. “Although some websites have indeed lost traffic due to reduced organic visibility, the bigger issue seems tied to increased usage of AI Overviews”—and now the launch of AI Mode.
Yes, the specter of AI hangs over every SERP. The unhelpful vibe many people now get from Google searches, regardless of the internal metrics the company may use, may come from a fundamental shift in how Google surfaces information in the age of AI.
The AI Overview hangover
In 2025, you can’t talk about Google’s changes to search without acknowledging the AI-generated elephant in the room. As it wrapped up that hefty core update in March 2024, Google also announced a major expansion of AI in search, moving the “Search Generative Experience” out of labs and onto Google.com. The feature was dubbed “AI Overviews.”
The AI Overview box has been a fixture on Google’s search results page ever since its debut a year ago. The feature uses the same foundational AI model as Google’s Gemini chatbot to formulate answers to your search queries by ingesting the top 100 (!) search results. It sits at the top of the page, pushing so-called blue link content even farther down below the ads and knowledge graph content. It doesn’t launch on every query, and sometimes it answers questions you didn’t ask—or even hallucinates a totally wrong answer.
And it’s not without some irony that Google’s laudable decision to de-rank synthetic AI slop comes at the same time that Google heavily promotes its own AI-generated content right at the top of SERPs.
AI Overviews appear right at the top of many search results.
Credit: Google
AI Overviews appear right at the top of many search results. Credit: Google
What is Google getting for all of this AI work? More eyeballs, it would seem. “AI is driving more engagement than ever before on Google,” says Yu. BrightEdge data shows that impressions on Google are up nearly 50 percent since AI Overviews launched. Many of the opinions you hear about AI Overviews online are strongly negative, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t paying attention to the feature. In its Q1 2025 earnings report, Google announced that AI Overviews is being “used” by 1.5 billion people every month. (Since you can’t easily opt in or opt out of AI Overviews, this “usage” claim should be taken with a grain of salt.)
Interestingly, the impact of AI Overviews has varied across the web. In October 2024, Google was so pleased with AI Overviews that it expanded them to appear in more queries. And as AI crept into more queries, publishers saw a corresponding traffic drop. Yu estimates this drop to be around 30 percent on average for those with high AI query coverage. For searches that are less supported in AI Overviews—things like restaurants and financial services—the traffic change has been negligible. And there are always exceptions. Yu suggests that some large businesses with high AI Overview query coverage have seen much smaller drops in traffic because they rank extremely well as both AI citations and organic results.
Lower traffic isn’t the end of the world for some businesses. Last May, AI Overviews were largely absent from B2B queries, but that turned around in a big way in recent months. BrightEdge estimates that 70 percent of B2B searches now have AI answers, which has reduced traffic for many companies. Yu doesn’t think it’s all bad, though. “People don’t click through as much—they engage a lot more on the AI—but when they do click, the conversion rate for the business goes up,” Yu says. In theory, serious buyers click and window shoppers don’t.
But the Internet is not a giant mall that exists only for shoppers. It is, first and foremost, a place to share and find information, and AI Overviews have hit some purveyors of information quite hard. At launch, AI Overviews were heavily focused on “What is” and “How to” queries. Such “service content” is a staple of bloggers and big media alike, and these types of publishers aren’t looking for sales conversions—it’s traffic that matters. And they’re getting less of it because AI Overviews “helpfully” repackages and remixes their content, eliminating the need to click through to the site. Some publishers are righteously indignant, asking how it’s fair for Google to remix content it doesn’t own, and to do so without compensation.
But Google’s intentions don’t end with AI Overviews. Last week, the company started an expanded public test of so-called “AI Mode,” right from the front page. AI Mode doesn’t even bother with those blue links. It’s a chatbot experience that, at present, tries to answer your query without clearly citing sources inline. (On some occasions, it will mention Reddit or Wikipedia.) On the right side of the screen, Google provides a little box with three sites linked, which you can expand to see more options. To the end user, it’s utterly unclear if those are “sources,” “recommendations,” or “partner deals.”
Perhaps more surprisingly, in our testing, not a single AI Mode “sites box” listed a site that ranked on the first page for the same query on a regular search. That is, the links in AI Mode for “best foods to eat for a cold” don’t overlap at all with the SERP for the same query in Google Search. In fairness, AI Mode is very new, and its behavior will undoubtedly change. But the direction the company is headed seems clear.
Google’s real goal is to keep you on Google or other Alphabet properties. In 2019, Rand Fishkin noticed that Google’s evolution from search engine to walled garden was at a tipping point. At that time—and for the first time—more than half of Google searches resulted in zero click-throughs to other sites. But data did show large numbers of clicks to Google’s own properties, like YouTube and Maps. If Google doesn’t intend to deliver a “zero-click” search experience, you wouldn’t know it from historical performance data or the new features the company develops.
You also wouldn’t know it from the way AI Overviews work. They do cite some of the sources used in building each output, and data suggests people click on those links. But are the citations accurate? Is every source used for constructing an AI Overview cited? We don’t really know, as Google is famously opaque about how its search works. We do know that Google uses a customized version of Gemini to support AI Overviews and that Gemini has been trained on billions and billions of webpages.
When AI Overviews do cite a source, it’s not clear how those sources came to be the ones cited. There’s good reason to be suspicious here: AI Overview’s output is not great, as witnessed by the numerous hallucinations we all know and love (telling people to eat rocks, for instance). The only thing we know for sure is that Google isn’t transparent about any of this.
No signs of slowing
Despite all of that, Google is not slowing down on AI in search. More recent core updates have only solidified this new arrangement with an ever-increasing number of AI-answered queries. The company appears OK with its current accuracy problems, or at the very least, it’s comfortable enough to push out AI updates anyway. Google appears to have been caught entirely off guard by the public launch of ChatGPT, and it’s now utilizing its search dominance to play catch-up.
To make matters even more dicey, Google isn’t even trying to address the biggest issue in all this: The company’s quest for zero-click search harms the very content creators upon which the company has built its empire.
For its part, Google has been celebrating its AI developments, insisting that content producers don’t know what’s best for them, refuting any concerns with comments about search volume increases and ever-more-complex search query strings. The changes must be working!
Google has been building toward this moment for years. The company started with a list of 10 blue links and nothing else, but little by little, it pushed the links down the page and added more content that keeps people in the Google ecosystem. Way back in 2007, Google added Universal Search, which allowed it to insert content from Google Maps, YouTube, and other services. In 2009, Rich Snippets began displaying more data from search results on SERPs. In 2012, the Knowledge Graph began extracting data from search results to display answers in the search results. Each change kept people on Google longer and reduced click-throughs, all the while pushing the search results down the page.
AI Overviews, and especially AI Mode, are the logical outcome of Google’s yearslong transformation from an indexer of information to an insular web portal built on scraping content from around the web. Earlier in Google’s evolution, the implicit agreement was that websites would allow Google to crawl their pages in exchange for sending them traffic. That relationship has become strained as the company has kept more traffic for itself, reducing click-throughs to websites even as search volume continues to increase. And locking Google out isn’t a realistic option when the company controls almost the entire search market.
Even when Google has taken a friendlier approach, business concerns could get in the way. During the search antitrust trial, documents showed that Google initially intended to let sites opt out of being used for AI training for its search-based AI features—but these sites would still be included in search results. The company ultimately canned that idea, leaving site operators with the Pyrrhic choice of participating in the AI “revolution” or becoming invisible on the web. Google now competes with, rather than supports, the open web.
When many of us look at Google’s search results today, the vibe feels off. Maybe it’s the AI, maybe it’s Google’s algorithm, or maybe the Internet just isn’t what it once was. Whatever the cause, the shift toward zero-click search that began more than a decade ago was made clear by the March 2024 core update, and it has only accelerated with the launch of AI Mode. Even businesses that have escaped major traffic drops from AI Overviews could soon find that Google’s AI-only search can get much more overbearing.
The AI slop will continue until morale improves.
Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.
Google and the DOJ have had their say; now it’s in the judge’s hands.
Last year, United States District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in search. Now, Google and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have had their say in the remedy phase of the trial, which wraps up today. It will determine the consequences for Google’s actions, potentially changing the landscape for search as we rocket into the AI era, whether we like it or not.
The remedy trial featured over 20 witnesses, including representatives from some of the most important technology firms in the world. Their statements about the past, present, and future of search moved markets, but what does the testimony mean for Google?
Everybody wants Chrome
One of the DOJ’s proposed remedies is to force Google to divest Chrome and the open source Chromium project. Google has been adamant both in and out of the courtroom that it is the only company that can properly run Chrome. It says selling Chrome would negatively impact privacy and security because Google’s technology is deeply embedded in the browser. And regardless, Google Chrome would be too expensive for anyone to buy.
Unfortunately for Google, it may have underestimated the avarice of its rivals. The DOJ called witnesses from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Yahoo—all of them said their firms were interested in buying Chrome. Yahoo’s Brian Provost noted that the company is currently working on a browser that supports the company’s search efforts. Provost said that it would take 6–9 months just to get a working prototype, but buying Chrome would be much faster. He suggested Yahoo’s search share could rise from the low single digits to double digits almost immediately with Chrome.
Credit: Aurich Lawson
Meanwhile, OpenAI is burning money on generative AI, but Nick Turley, product manager for ChatGPT, said the company was prepared to buy Chrome if the opportunity arises. Like Yahoo, OpenAI has explored designing its own browser, but acquiring Chrome would instantly give it 3.5 billion users. If OpenAI got its hands on Chrome, Turley predicted an “AI-first” experience.
On the surface, the DOJ’s proposal to force a Chrome sale seems like an odd remedy for a search monopoly. However, the testimony made the point rather well. Search and browsers are inextricably linked—putting a different search engine in the Chrome address bar could give the new owner a major boost.
Browser choice conundrum
Also at issue in the trial are the massive payments Google makes to companies like Apple and Mozilla for search placement, as well as restrictions on search and app pre-loads on Android phones. The government says these deals are anti-competitive because they lock rivals out of so many distribution mechanisms.
Google pays Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars per year to remain the default search engine in their browsers. Apple’s Eddie Cue admitted he’s been losing sleep worrying about the possibility of losing that revenue. Meanwhile, Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim explained that losing the Google deal could spell the end of Firefox. He testified that Mozilla would have to make deep cuts across the company, which could lead to a “downward spiral” that dooms the browser.
Google’s goal here is to show that forcing it to drop these deals could actually reduce consumer choice, which does nothing to level the playing field, as the DOJ hopes to do. Google’s preferred remedy is to simply have less exclusivity in its search deals across both browsers and phones.
The great Google spinoff
While Google certainly doesn’t want to lose Chrome, there may be a more fundamental threat to its business in the DOJ’s remedies. The DOJ argued that Google’s illegal monopoly has given it an insurmountable technology lead, but a collection of data remedies could address that. Under the DOJ proposal, Google would have to license some of its core search technology, including the search index and ranking algorithm.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave testimony at the trial and cited these data remedies as no better than a spinoff of Google search. Google’s previous statements have referred to this derisively as “white labeling” Google search. Pichai claimed these remedies could force Google to reevaluate the amount it spends on research going forward, slowing progress in search for it and all the theoretical licensees.
Currently, there is no official API for syndicating Google’s search results. There are scrapers that aim to offer that service, but that’s a gray area, to say the least. Google has even rejected lucrative deals to share its index. Turley noted in his testimony that OpenAI approached Google to license the index for ChatGPT, but Google decided the deal could harm its search dominance, which was more important than a short-term payday.
AI advances
Initially, the DOJ wanted to force Google to stop investing in AI firms, fearing its influence could reduce competition as it gained control or acquired these startups. The government has backed away from this remedy, but AI is still core to the search trial. That seemed to surprise Judge Mehta.
During Pichai’s testimony, Mehta remarked that the status of AI had shifted considerably since the liability phase of the trial in 2023. “The consistent testimony from the witnesses was that the integration of AI and search or the impact of AI on search was years away,” Mehta said. Things are very different now, Mehta noted, with multiple competitors to Google in AI search. This may actually help Google’s case.
AI search has exploded since the 2023 trial, with Google launching its AI-only search product in beta earlier this year.
AI search has exploded since the 2023 trial, with Google launching its AI-only search product in beta earlier this year.
Throughout the trial, Google has sought to paint search as a rapidly changing market where its lead is no longer guaranteed. Google’s legal team pointed to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT, which has become an alternative to traditional search for many people.
On the other hand, Google doesn’t want to look too meek and ineffectual in the age of AI. Apple’s Eddie Cue testified toward the end of the trial and claimed that rival traditional search providers like DuckDuckGo don’t pose a real threat to Google, but AI does. According to Cue, search volume in Safari was down for the first time in April, which he attributed to people using AI services instead. Google saw its stock price drop on the news, forcing it to issue a statement denying Cue’s assessment. It says searches in Safari and other products are still growing.
A waiting game
With the arguments made, Google’s team will have to sweat it out this summer while Mehta decides on remedies. A decision is expected in August of this year, but that won’t be the end of it. Google is still hoping to overturn the original verdict. After the remedies are decided, it’s going to appeal and ask for a pause on the implementation of remedies. So it could be a while before anything changes for Google.
In the midst of all that, Google is still pursuing an appeal of the Google Play case brought by Epic Games, as well as the ad tech case that it lost a few weeks ago. That remedy trial will begin in September.
Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.
Reddit executives discussed plans on Tuesday for making more money from the platform, including showing ads in more places and possibly putting some content behind a paywall.
On Tuesday, Reddit shared its Q2 2024 earnings report (PDF). The company lost $10.1 million during the period, down from Q2 2023’s $41.1 million loss. Reddit has never been profitable, and during its earnings call yesterday, company heads discussed potential and slated plans for monetization.
As expected, selling ads continues to be a priority. Part of the reason Reddit was OK with most third-party Reddit apps closing was that the change was expected to drive people to Reddit’s native website and apps, where the company sells ads. In Q2, Reddit’s ad revenue grew 41 percent year over year (YoY) to $253.1 million, or 90 percent of total revenue ($281.2 million).
When asked how the platform would grow ad revenue, Reddit COO Jen Wong said it’s important that advertisers “find the outcomes they want at the volumes and price they want.” She also pointed to driving more value per ad, or the cost that advertisers pay per average 1,000 impressions. To do that, Wong pointed to putting ads in places on Reddit where there aren’t ads currently:
There are still many places on Reddit without ads today. So we’re more focused on designing ads for spaces where users are spending more time versus increasing ad load in existing spaces. So for example, 50 percent of screen views, they’re now on conversation pages—that’s an opportunity.
Wong said that in places where Reddit does show ads currently, the ad load is “light” compared to about half of its rivals.
One of the places where Redditors may see more ads is within comments, which Wong noted that Reddit is currently testing. This ad capability is only “experimental,” Wong emphasized, but Reddit sees ads in comments as a way to stand out to advertisers.
There’s also an opportunity to sell ad space within Reddit search results, according to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who said yesterday that “over the long term, there’s significant advertising potential there as well.” More immediately, though, Reddit is looking to improve its search capabilities and this year will test “new search result pages powered by AI to summarize and recommend content, helping users dive deeper into products, shows, games, and discover new communities on Reddit,” Huffman revealed yesterday. He said Reddit is using first- and third-party AI models to improve search aspects like speed and relevance.
The move comes as Reddit is currently blocking all search engines besides Google, OpenAI, and approved education/research instances from showing recent Reddit content in their results. Yesterday, Huffman reiterated his statement that Reddit is working with “big and small” search engines to strike deals like it already has with Google and OpenAI. But looking ahead, Reddit is focused on charging for content scraping and seems to be trying to capitalize on people’s interest in using Reddit as a filter for search results.
Paywalled content possible
The possibility of paywalls came up during the earnings call when an analyst asked Huffman about maintaining Reddit’s culture as it looks to “earn money now for people and creators on the platform.” Reddit has already launched a Contributor Program, where popular posts can make Reddit users money. It has discussed monetizing its developer platform, which is in public beta with “a few hundred active developers,” Huffman said yesterday. In response to the analyst’s question, Huffman said that based on his experience, adding new ways of using Reddit “expands” the platform but doesn’t “cannibalize existing Reddit.”
He continued:
I think the existing altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has. But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas—things of that nature.
Huffman’s comments suggest that paywalls could be added to new subreddits rather than existing ones. At this stage, though, it’s unclear how users may be charged to use Reddit in the future if at all.
The idea of paywalling some content comes as various online entities are trying to diversify revenue beyond often volatile ad spending. Reddit has also tried elevating free aspects of the site, such as updates to Ask Me Anything (AMA), including new features like RSVPs, which were announced Tuesday.
Reddit has angered some long-time users with recent changes—including blocking search engines, forcing personalized ads, introducing an exclusionary fee for API access, and ousting some moderators during last year’s user protests—but Reddit saw its daily active unique user count increase by 51 percent YoY in Q2 to 91.2 million.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
The landmark antitrust ruling against Google on Monday is shaking up one of the longest-standing partnerships in tech.
At the heart of the case are billions of dollars’ worth of exclusive agreements Google has inked over the years to become the default search engine on browsers and devices across the world. No company benefited more than fellow Big Tech giant Apple—which US District Judge Amit Mehta called a “crucial partner” to Google.
During a weekslong trial, Apple executives showed up to explain and defend the partnership. Under a deal that first took shape in 2002, Google paid a cut of search advertising revenue to Apple to direct its users to Google Search as default, with payments reaching $20 billion for 2022, according to the court’s findings. In exchange, Google got access to Apple’s valuable user base—more than half of all search queries in the US currently flow through Apple devices.
Since Monday’s ruling, Apple has been quiet. But it is likely to be deeply involved in the next phase of the case, which will address the proposed fix to Google’s legal breaches. Remedies in the case could be targeted or wide-ranging. The Department of Justice, which brought the case, has not said what it will seek.
“The most profound impact of the judgment is liable to be felt by Apple,” said Eric Seufert, an independent analyst.
JPMorgan analysts wrote that the ruling left Apple with a range of “inconvenient alternatives,” including the possibility of a new revenue-sharing agreement with Google that does not grant it exclusive rights as the default search engine, thereby reducing its value.
Reaching revenue-sharing deals with alternative search engines like Microsoft’s Bing, they wrote, would “offer lower economic benefits for Apple, given Google’s superior advertising monetisation.”
Mehta noted in his ruling that the idea of replacing the Google agreement with one involving Microsoft and Bing had come up previously. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, “concluded that a Microsoft-Apple deal would only make sense if Apple ‘view[ed] Google as somebody [they] don’t want to be in business with and therefore are willing to jeopardize revenue to get out. Otherwise it [was a] no brainer to stay with Google as it is as close to a sure thing as can be,’” Mehta wrote.
Apple could build its own search engine. It has not yet done so, and the judge in the case stopped short of agreeing with the DoJ that the Google deal amounted to a “pay-off” to Apple to keep it out of the search engine market. An internal Apple study in 2018, cited in the judge’s opinion, found that even if it did so and maintained 80 percent of queries, it would still lose $12 billion in revenue in the first five years after separating from Google.
Mehta cited an email from John Giannandrea, a former Google executive who now works for Apple, saying, “There is considerable risk that [Apple] could end up with an unprofitable search engine that [is] also not better for users.”
Google has vowed to appeal against the ruling. Nicholas Rodelli, an analyst at CRFA Research, said it was a “long shot,” given the “meticulous” ruling.
Rodelli said he believed the judge “isn’t likely to issue a game-changing injunction,” such as a full ban on revenue-sharing with Apple. Depending on the remedy the judge decides for Google’s antitrust violations, Seufert said Apple could “either be forced to accept a much less lucrative arrangement with Microsoft [over Bing] or may be prevented from selling search defaults at all.”
“It’s certainly going to adjust the relationship between Google and Apple,” said Bill Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission chair and professor of competition law and policy at George Washington University Law School.
Mozilla’s funding may be at risk
Apple is not the only company potentially affected by Monday’s ruling. According to the court, Google’s 2021 payment to Mozilla for the default position on its browser was more than $400 million, about 80 percent of Mozilla’s operating budget. A spokesperson for Mozilla said it was “closely reviewing” the decision and “how we can positively influence the next steps.”
Meanwhile, the search market is undergoing a transformation, as companies such as Google and Microsoft explore how generative AI chatbots can transform traditional search features.
Apple’s partnership with OpenAI, announced in June, will allow users to direct their queries to its chatbot ChatGPT. A smarter Siri voice assistant powered by Apple’s own proprietary AI models will also create a new outlet for user queries that might otherwise go to Google. Apple’s models are trained using Applebot, a web crawler that, much like the technology behind a search engine, compiles public information from across the Internet.
Traditional search is showing no signs of slowing. Research from Emarketer finds that, in the US alone, spend on search advertising will grow at an average of about 10 percent each year, hitting $184 billion in 2028. Google, the dominant player by a long shot, captures about half of that spend. Apple’s current deal with Google would have allowed it to unilaterally extend the partnership into 2028.
The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker has its own antitrust battle to wage. The DoJ’s antitrust division, led by Jonathan Kanter, filed a sweeping lawsuit against Apple in March, making it the latest Big Tech giant to be targeted by the Biden administration’s enforcers.
The legal troubles reflect an ongoing decline in Apple’s relationship with policymakers in Washington, despite an effort by chief executive Tim Cook to step up the company’s lobbying of the Biden White House, according to research by the Tech Transparency Project. TTP found that Apple spent $9.9 million on lobbying the federal government in 2023—its highest in 25 years, though still much lower than the likes of Google, Amazon, and Meta.
But the more I’ve thought about that rollout, the more I’ve begun to question the wisdom of Google’s AI-powered search results in the first place. Even when the system doesn’t give obviously wrong results, condensing search results into a neat, compact, AI-generated summary seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how people use Google in the first place.
Reliability and relevance
When people type a question into the Google search bar, they only sometimes want the kind of basic reference information that can be found on a Wikipedia page or corporate website (or even a Google information snippet). Often, they’re looking for subjective information where there is no one “right” answer: “What are the best Mexican restaurants in Santa Fe?” or “What should I do with my kids on a rainy day?” or “How can I prevent cheese from sliding off my pizza?”
The value of Google has always been in pointing you to the places it thinks are likely to have good answers to those questions. But it’s still up to you, as a user, to figure out which of those sources is the most reliable and relevant to what you need at that moment.
This wasn’t funny when the guys at Pep Boys said it, either. (via)
Kyle Orland / Google
Weird Al recommends “running with scissors” as well! (via)
Kyle Orland / Google
This list of steps actually comes from a forum thread response about doing something completely different. (via)
If everything’s cheaper now, why does everything seem so expensive?
Kyle Orland / Google
Pretty sure this Truman was never president… (via)
Kyle Orland / Google
For reliability, any savvy Internet user makes use of countless context clues when judging a random Internet search result. Do you recognize the outlet or the author? Is the information from someone with seeming expertise/professional experience or a random forum poster? Is the site well-designed? Has it been around for a while? Does it cite other sources that you trust, etc.?
But Google also doesn’t know ahead of time which specific result will fit the kind of information you’re looking for. When it comes to restaurants in Santa Fe, for instance, are you in the mood for an authoritative list from a respected newspaper critic or for more off-the-wall suggestions from random locals? Or maybe you scroll down a bit and stumble on a loosely related story about the history of Mexican culinary influences in the city.
One of the unseen strengths of Google’s search algorithm is that the user gets to decide which results are the best for them. As long as there’s something reliable and relevant in those first few pages of results, it doesn’t matter if the other links are “wrong” for that particular search or user.
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine platform, went down in the very early morning today. That meant that searches from Microsoft’s Edge browsers that had yet to change their default providers didn’t work. It also meant that services relying on Bing’s search API—Microsoft’s own Copilot, ChatGPT search, Yahoo, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo—similarly failed.
If dismay about AI’s hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning. Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there’s a real alternative.
Search engine market share, as measured by StatCounter, April 2023–April 2024.
StatCounter
Upward of a billion dollars a year
The overwhelming majority of search tools offering an “alternative” to Google are using Google, Bing, or Yandex, the three major search engines that maintain massive global indexes. Yandex, being based in Russia, is a non-starter for many people around the world at the moment. Bing offers its services widely, most notably to DuckDuckGo, but its ad-based revenue model and privacy particulars have caused some friction there in the past. Before his company was able to block more of Microsoft’s own tracking scripts, DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg explained in a Reddit reply why firms like his weren’t going the full DIY route:
… [W]e source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing … Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw — only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.
Bing makes Microsoft money, if not quite profit yet. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep its search index stocked and API open, even if its focus is almost entirely on its own AI chatbot version of Bing. Yet if Microsoft decided to pull API access, or it became unreliable, Google’s default position gets even stronger. What would non-conformists have to choose from then?
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.
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 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 include business listings and ratings from numerous providers, placing data from Google’s directory right alongside Yelp and others.
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.”
