> Hotels are concerned that direct booking clicks are down as much as 30% since our compliance changes were implemented. These businesses now have to connect with customers via a handful of intermediaries that typically charge large commissions, while traffic from Google was free.
That's because your search engine results are a joke, not because of the DMA.
If I search for 'hotel <city>', I get an ad from Booking.com, then some hotel ad, then an ad from Trivago, then some Google map with hotels (make sense, but all results there are sponsored by intermediaries), then Booking.com, then Booking.com again, then Expedia, then Tripadvisor, then Trivago.
If you only present me sponsored results from intermediaries, then don't be surprised that people only click on sponsored results of intermediaries.
I use flights all the time. I think mostly because I've not found any of the intermediaries all that good. Google flights provides links to multiple places to buy. Usually I click the link directly to the airline.
I've looked at hotels but rarely use it. Hotel websites, unless they're a major chain, are often pretty crap so booking.com is what I generally use.
Google flights is the only tool (I've seen) that offers so many helpful filter options. It's so easy to find the perfect itinerary. And the overall UX far surpasses anything else.
This is such a weird complaint, Google searches hasn't taken you to the websites of various hotels for a decade or more, maybe a few pages in they did, but the first page of search results have been booking sites and ads for booking sites for a long time.
If the booking sites are such a huge issue for the hotels, which I can honestly believe, then don't use them, or do collective negotiations with them and demand better rates.
The complaint about the maps button not being on the search page is rather funny, because I haven't used that in ages. I've been using search engines which has a ! operator, so !gm or !maps for 10+ years every time I needed a map, so I just didn't notice. While I haven't read the DMA rules, it does seem strange that they can't just link to Google maps.
As far as I understand it, the DMA forbids them from exploiting their dominance in the search engine space to promote Maps. This is similar to the mobile space where users must be presented with a choice of their preferred browser and search engine.
I believe they would be legally okay if they presented users with a choice of their preferred Maps provider (e.g. Google Maps, OSM, Bing, or Apple Maps), but they've decided to implement it in the most obnoxious way possible.
Unfortunately, this blog post is completely untrustworthy, because the data isn’t public. The only public thing are the links in this section: "Many European users are raising concerns on message boards and in our help forums that they no longer see a useful Google Maps tab on our Search results page."
"Many Europeans" being tens of concerned users. Underwhelming.
Exactly. I’d like to see the ratio of maps complaints they are listening to[1] vs say “Google reader is being shut down” complaints which they ignored. I’m guessing it’s pretty low.
[1] Which purely by coincidence happen to fit their anti-dma agenda
Just the usual corporate whine against something that is inconvenient for them.
It's mostly ineffective in Europe but I think it's probably targeted at Americans, in order to convince them that they shouldn't push for the same things in the US.
Anecdote, not data, but I was actually confused where that tab went and blamed it on some poor new AI powered UI change, that was trying to guess what was useful for me. Turns out it was regulatory. Who knew?
If they really wanted to promote competition, Google will give an option on incorporation results from the price scanner service/airline of customer's choice in their search results.
Their should be an open API standard and if airlines support that standard then any search service should be able to integrate any airline/intermediary service for pricing information. Then you get all the benefits of Google flights but it's not market dominance any more. And customers should be able add the sources they trust in their search configuration.
> If they really wanted to promote competition, Google will give an option on incorporation results from the price scanner service/airline of customer's choice in their search results.
That's what Google displays and this is not what I'm taking about. I'm talking about a standard Rest API that each site can implement, so that any search engine like Bing, Duck duck go and use to display those exact results.
There should be an open set of standards to allow users to select their search, travel, map, video, mail etc providers. You should get google mail results on bing search, Vimeo results on Google search, your travel bookings on any search engine or chat agent UI you choose.
Obviously we need to solve for all the security and cross border data issues etc etc. But we also need to bake in the UX innovations rather than just go back to the 90’s.
The issue then becomes: who is providing these services, and why? Currently most of these services extract value by controlling the UI their users interface with to include advertisements or limit features to reserve them for upsells. If users are free to interact with whatever service they want with whatever client they want then there is no longer space to monetize by forcing a bad user experience. This will collapse the most-used Internet services for mail, search, and messaging.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it sounds great, where do I sign the petition?
This article is about the click-through data from Google though, and an URL bar is not a search engine. To the point that all modern browsers just redirect you to a search engine when you write random stuff in the url bar.
So, the gist of their argument is that DMA is bad because it is forcing them to disable certain features (some of which I found useful and miss) which is detrimental to search users because the results that THEY GENERATE are not good enough?
(I know this is not a completely accurate summary)
In EU Google still extracts answers from webpages so some of the time you do not need to go and visit the page. This feels parasitic to me . Other weird thing is that Google will put on top YouTube videos that might have the answer , but for this one I am not sure if most people this days would prefer a video then text with the response but makes me wonder if YouTube would not be part of Google if it would also be on top.
> still extracts answers from webpages so some of the time you do not need to go and visit the page. This feels parasitic to me
Set aside "who makes money" for a moment. In an ideal world, "here's the answer you were searching for, faster" is generally exactly what you want. It seems unfortunate if some other concern is leading to users not actually getting what they were looking for as quickly.
But, if Big Tech kills the forums and all communities say go proprietary like Slack or Discord I will not find no new answers after say 2020. It is a short time win for people that search but then we all starve because we killed the public internet .
The stuff about flights is not clear to me. Is this about flights results in Google Search, or is it also about searching on Google Flights i.e. https://www.google.com/travel/flights - I use Google Flights in Europe a lot and I haven't noticed any decline.
It does require some effort. If Google decides to show a Directions button, you can get Maps and directions from a random location, but you can recover from that. If it doesn’t, the only option is going to maps.google.com (or finding the Maps in the other services menu in the top right corner) and re-typing your query.
I travel a lot for work and corporate travel booking is still in the stranglehold of Amadeus/Sabre/Travelport intermediated booking agents and they suck – there's always something or the other that's broken – seat selection is not available, price is higher than direct or offers available elsewhere, loyalty points don't get accrued, etc – and the corporate travel agent insists they have to use their clunky tool.
The real problem is airlines and hotels reservation systems need to modernize and adopt modern web protocol standards that enable direct discovery and booking via any aggregator including search engines like Google etc. But unfortunately, airlines and hotels IT systems are lagging.
That's exactly how Google Flights used to work when it was linked from search results. Now users get the benefit of competition and get to choose from a variety of intermediary services.
Google Flights is getting to be unsafe to use due to the proliferation of fly-by-night "travel agencies" undercutting the legitimate sellers by a small amount and getting users sent to disreputable pages to collect passenger information and payment. I almost fell for one of these scams after naively assuming Google Flights _surely_ wouldn't partner with illegitimate sites for ticketing... but that's the way things are going now.
I have a mixed feeling about this. One one hand when I search for something google directs me to content farma, not directly to place I want to visit. For example if I search for pearl I would like to see Perl site, not 'best languages of 2024'. This has not yet been do, it just illustrates my point.
Google claims to stand for small business, but (my understanding is) part of the justification of DMA is to reduce the xonpetitive advantage of mega techs.
That is, Alphabet is required to separate their various products and not use data from one to influence the other.
I am guessing this is what is making Flights more cumbersome. But i think we need a legal expert to explain exactly how the law is causing this.
From my personal perspective, I remember flight search being really really crappy before Google flights hit the scene in ~2012.
Companies like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz, etc and the airlines themselves just weren’t getting the job done.
When Google flights gets refactored due to the regulations, my hypothesis is that we won’t see a spring of new innovation, but rather we’ll regress to the trajectory set by the old travel companies
If G Flights is the most popular flight booking site/tool, will it not continue to appear at the top of search results? It would just require a click-through to get to.
Heck, if Google wanted they could publish some standard for exposing your site as a trip-booking tool that can appear right on a search results page like Flights does now, and if a page exposing that sort of embeddable widget ranks first in a search then it could display the widget above the results.
Mostly I've used Momondo for flights and Google Flights always seemed like the worst search engine for flights, so I don't see Google having brought much innovation to the industry. Maybe my use is just weird, because I use the flight search to find the departure I want, then go to the airlines website to book the flight.
Why should it get worse? It is a separate product and works standalone, no? I for one always go directly to google.com/flights
I don’t see the need to have this embedded in Google SERPs. This way, Google Flights can still link directly to airlines while having saner competition for flight aggregators.
I love Google flights but can see the argument that it stifles competition and innovation. Not sure what the solution is, but a bunch of search result links sucks.
Google Flights is great. Google using its search dominance to ensure it's the only flight booking tool anyone will encounter is anti-competitive. Now in this case it is the case that their tool is the best available, but in general leveraging dominance in one field to nearly guarantee dominance in another is not acceptable.
It's not a flight booking tool. It's a flight search tool. Once you choose your flight it gives you a list of sites to book the flight on. That list is usually the airline itself and then several intermediaries
There's a big difference. Sites like Expedia you actually go through their checkout process and pay them, then they integrate with the airline system to make a reservation. If you want to make a change you have to go through Expedia instead of the airline. You have a terms of service agreement with Expedia, etc. It's a full intermediary.
Google never takes your money for the flight or manages a reservation.
> And there’s a greater risk that you’ll end up on a travel website advertising a low fare that jumps just before you make a purchase, with a message like “this fare is no longer available.”
Might sound like FUD at first glance, but I do remember this kind of dark patterns once being the norm across the board, especially in the early 2010s. Heck, even with GFlights I still find myself sometimes double-checking the airline's own booking tool (with reasonable attempt at isolation) just to be sure; gladly I never spotted any discrepancy this way.
Good on them for following the playbook. (1) Comply maliciously to anger your users, (2) Employ strategic gaslighting to misdirect that anger at the regulators, (3) Profit
I'm not saying they have to like it, I just wish there were consequences for overtly malicious behavior. If they want to kick and scream but ultimately do their best to comply, that's fine.
Last time they blamed their obnoxious (and illegal) GDPR consent dialogs on the regulators, now they're doing it again with the DMA.
That's because your search engine results are a joke, not because of the DMA.
If I search for 'hotel <city>', I get an ad from Booking.com, then some hotel ad, then an ad from Trivago, then some Google map with hotels (make sense, but all results there are sponsored by intermediaries), then Booking.com, then Booking.com again, then Expedia, then Tripadvisor, then Trivago.
If you only present me sponsored results from intermediaries, then don't be surprised that people only click on sponsored results of intermediaries.