Tech giant Google is going public with the results of a recently conducted experiment where it got rid of news from its search results.
The search engine giant shared how the move was done for 1% of its users for 2.5 months across eight different EU markets. This is when they found how the results proved that news is clearly worthless for the company’s ad business.
Google explained the reasoning behind carrying out such tests to be related to the EU forcing it to pay a hefty amount that goes to news publishers. This is related to the reuse of snippets for their content. So the company knew that it needed to get a valued estimate of this kind of feature which it found to be extremely overpriced.
The cost of journalism for Google’s business was called to be an estimate as the actual price couldn’t be calculated statistically as a whole or by each nation separately. The search giant mentioned how it was working hard to use such outcomes as leverage for payment negotiations with other EU publishers.
But the organization might be taking a risky step as it has already come across serious antitrust fines in places like France. This has to do with news content. Therefore, being fined more than half a billion dollars over this type of approach for copyright negotiations with a specific publisher is worrying.
Meanwhile, countries like Germany have stepped up scrutiny of different elements of the firm’s behavior related to news. This forced the organization to produce changes. Therefore, any kind of move by Google to undermine the effects of the copyright law by stating news is worthless might land it in hot waters by regulators again.
While the firm did include French users across these types of ablation tests, they restricted this type of experiment after one French court sent a warning for breaking past agreements with an antitrust authority. Moreover, Google also failed to run the test for Germany.
Image: DIWAigen
Read next: Lost in Search: Google Drops Pages That Underperform, Even If They’re Indexed
The search engine giant shared how the move was done for 1% of its users for 2.5 months across eight different EU markets. This is when they found how the results proved that news is clearly worthless for the company’s ad business.
Google explained the reasoning behind carrying out such tests to be related to the EU forcing it to pay a hefty amount that goes to news publishers. This is related to the reuse of snippets for their content. So the company knew that it needed to get a valued estimate of this kind of feature which it found to be extremely overpriced.
The cost of journalism for Google’s business was called to be an estimate as the actual price couldn’t be calculated statistically as a whole or by each nation separately. The search giant mentioned how it was working hard to use such outcomes as leverage for payment negotiations with other EU publishers.
But the organization might be taking a risky step as it has already come across serious antitrust fines in places like France. This has to do with news content. Therefore, being fined more than half a billion dollars over this type of approach for copyright negotiations with a specific publisher is worrying.
Meanwhile, countries like Germany have stepped up scrutiny of different elements of the firm’s behavior related to news. This forced the organization to produce changes. Therefore, any kind of move by Google to undermine the effects of the copyright law by stating news is worthless might land it in hot waters by regulators again.
While the firm did include French users across these types of ablation tests, they restricted this type of experiment after one French court sent a warning for breaking past agreements with an antitrust authority. Moreover, Google also failed to run the test for Germany.
Read next: Lost in Search: Google Drops Pages That Underperform, Even If They’re Indexed
