What you need to know
- In the European Union, the European Copyright Directive (EUCD) regulates how search engines and news aggregators can use, license, and preview news content.
- To measure the impact of news stories from EU publishers on Google services, the company will remove those stories from results in a limited test.
- Google says the test will affect 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.
To find out how much news stories appearing in Google News, Search, and Discover encourage readers to use Google products and services, the company will remove them altogether in an extremely limited test. One percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain won't see news content from EU-based publishers as Google collects data, the company announced today.
The changes come in response to a request from regulators and publishers, and is related to Article 15 of the European Copyright Directive (EUCD). This law dictates how search engines and news aggregators can use news content from publishers in the EU. As part of Google's compliance with the EUCD, it started an Extended News Previews (ENP) program. Essentially, the company pays publishers to show previews or snippets of news content under license.
Google says it has agreements with over 4,000 publications in 20 countries, and the deals are rooted in how much news content affects search and advertising. "These agreements are based on consistent criteria which respect the law and existing copyright guidance, including how often a news website is displayed and how much ad revenue is generated on pages that also display previews of news content," the company explains.
However, the EU's regulators and publishers now want "additional data about the effect of news content in Search on peoples’ use of our products." To get the data, Google is removing the news content from EU publishers in Google News, Google Search, and Google Discover for 1% of users in the previously-listed EU countries. Presumably, it will compare the usage of Google products and services with and without news content present.
This is a very minor test that only affects a small portion of EU users for a limited time. Results will still appear from publishers outside of the EU, and the removal of EU-based news is temporary. Google says that when the test ends, everything will go back to normal.
"We intend to use this test to assess how results from EU news publishers impact the search experience for our users and traffic to publishers," Google said in the blog post.
