EU Orders Google to Share Fresher Search Data with Smaller Rivals

The European Commission has ordered Google to provide more detailed and fresher search data to smaller search engines and AI chatbots in Europe. This decision comes after Brussels rejected Alphabet's anonymization method, value-based pricing, three-year cap on access, and attempt to keep AI chatbots out of the programme.

Google had previously offered a dataset with limited fields and old data, with almost 90-100% of unique queries removed by two frequency thresholds. The Commission considered this data close to useless for rival search engines and treated the low take-up as evidence that Google's programme does not achieve what Article 6(11) requires.

The decision highlights the importance of search engine quality, which rises with the number of users. Google Search holds an estimated global share of around 90%, against around 5% for Microsoft Bing. The Commission argues that this gap in scale produces a data gap, a considerable barrier to entry and expansion.