Google grades its own DMA rewrite of EU Search as the worst quality loss in 29 years

Real-time price details are among the features Google says it is removing from the affected European results ^[5]. For a hotel or flight query, that takes the transaction answer off the page: whether a room is free tonight, and at what price, now sits behind a click. Google says the new format covers travel, dining and related local categories ^[15]. The dev.to write-up puts the same question to the business's own pages, asking whether they still answer availability, pricing context and location ^[19].

The superlative is Google's own ^[1]. Twenty-nine years of history dates the comparison baseline to about 1997 ^[8], so the claim ranks this release against every earlier change to the results page. A vendor describing its own shipped release as the worst regression in the product's history is unusual, and the claim still needs a named metric.

Treat it the way you would treat a benchmark table from someone else's workload. It transfers to a given business only if that business's EU demand sits in the categories Google names, and only if the customers it stands to lose were arriving on the surfaces that moved. The dev.to account is explicit that search results, customer behaviour and the importance of comparison sites vary by query, market and sector, so a uniform traffic loss is not established ^[9]. Because the rollout is Europe-only and Google says users outside the EU are unaffected ^[3], non-EU markets are the closest available control for anything measured inside the EU.

The DMA obliges designated gatekeepers to change certain practices in European markets, and for Search that has meant continued changes to the treatment of vertical search services and third-party comparison providers, of which this rollout is one part ^[16]. Google has said further compliance steps will continue ^[14]. In its statements to Reuters, Google said the changes were necessary to meet the DMA's requirements and to avoid further penalties ^[12].