As Google continues to navigate its relationship with publishers, regulators, and news readers, the company is starting a pretty drastic test: it will remove news articles from European Union-based publishers from Search.
While the “test” is supposed to determine how it will impact traffic and the overall search experience, it won’t show up for everyone. Google will only remove EU news articles from search results, Google News, and Discover for one percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.
Google says it’s running the “time-limited” test because EU regulators and publishers “have asked for additional data about the effect of news content in Search.” The company says it will continue to show results from websites and news publishers located outside the EU, and it will resume showing results from EU news publishers once the test ends.
This may be just a small experiment, but it almost feels like a warning. By the end of the test, EU news publishers will see exactly how much traffic they’d be missing out on without Google. The experiment might also give Google some insight into how much its users actually care about news. That’s something Facebook has explored as well — which ultimately led it to remove the “News” tab and stop paying publishers entirely.
Over the years, Google has fought fiercely against regulations that would force the company to compensate publishers for their content. In the EU, Google is on the hook to comply with the European Copyright Directive, which has resulted in the search giant licensing content from hundreds of publishers in the region. Earlier this year, France ordered Google to pay $272 million after it found that the company violated an agreement over compensation for news publishers.
