Google says tighter EU search regulations would "hurt" innovation Tightening the proposed regulations on Google to resolve competition concerns in Europe would risk stunting advances in online search just as a wave of innovation is set to transform the industry, the US company's top search engineer has warned. The warning from Amit Singhal, a Google senior vice-president, comes as the European Commission's efforts to agree a set of voluntary concessions come to a head. Some Google critics have called for tougher sanctions than the proposed settlement the company reached with Brussels earlier this year. Final responses from Google's rivals to the draft terms are due to be submitted by Thursday. Joaquín Almunia, European competition commissioner, said last month that he thought it was "almost 100 per cent" likely that he would ask Google for some improvements to the settlement. Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Singhal warned that significant restrictions on how it presents results could hold back advances that promise to make search much more useful. "It would really hurt innovation if you freeze things as they are today," he said. Under the proposed settlement, Google would have to show links to rivals" websites alongside results from its own services in cases where it provided a direct answer to a user query. The plan has been attacked as too weak to attract users to other company's sites, starving them of traffic from the search engine. It could also become irrelevant as Google's services evolve, for instance with voice-activated search-and-response replacing the web searches used today. "We're building the search of the future," Mr Singhal said. We are getting closer to the vision of talking to Google and asking anything you want to know. Through a connected series of initiatives, Google has been pushing for a technological leap forward in search that would enable it to return answers to users instantly in response to a voice query. Drawing on personal information about the user, it also hopes to anticipate requests for information, supplying information before they are even asked for. Critics such as the BEUC, an alliance of European consumer organisations, have called for tighter rules than those in the draft settlement to make sure that answers supplied by rival internet companies also have a chance of coming out at the top of Google's search rankings. Google executives have denounced such calls for so-called "search neutrality" as unrealistic given the need for search engines to prioritise answers. "Not everyone can be at the top of search results," Mr Singhal said. "There will always be someone who will not be at the top who will be unhappy and complaining," he said. Google's use of personal information to tailor its services has also come under fire in Europe, with privacy regulators last week threatening to fine the company over the issue. In one example of how the company draws on personal data, Mr Singhal said Google would unveil a new feature on Tuesday that would let users ask the search engine for information about their personal contacts, then receive information such as a phone number. "If we aren't allowed to use all the information that is stored in Google, some of the products can't get built," he said.