Google has announced that it will carry out a test to measure the “impact” of removing news from search results in the European Union (EU), in order to evaluate how this content affects the users’ search experience and traffic to news publishers.
The American technology giant has been running the programa Extended News Previews (ENP) en Europaa service licenses for EU news publishers which is part of its commitment to comply with the European Copyright Directive (EUCD for its acronym in English).
As detailed, this program is based on criteria that “respect copyright guidelines,” including the frequency with which a news website is displayed and the amount of advertising revenue that are generated on these pages. Thus, since its launch in 2021, they currently have agreements with more than 4,000 publications in 20 EU countries.
Now, Google has noted that EU regulators and publishers have requested “additional data” about the effect news content has on search resultswhen users use their products.
As a result, the technology company has announced that They will carry out a “small and time-limited” test in which will stop showing news from EU-based publishers in the search results of Google News, Search and Discover, in order to analyze the “impact” that this content has.
As explained in a statement, this test will only affect the one percent of users in countries like Belgium, Croatia, DenmarkFrance, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. In addition, Google has specified that they will continue to show results from other websites, including news publishers outside the EU.
With all this, Google has stated that it will use this test to evaluate how they affect the results from EU news editors to users’ search experience and traffic to publishers. After completing the test, the news results will appear again as usual and the company will share the results with EU news publishers.