The team behind Google Search is tweaking their featured snippets – text boxes that sometimes spread misinformation while doing so trying to help. The company announced an update It’s meant to make answers more accurate and avoid the problem of false premises, or questions for which there is no final, logical answer. Combined with an expansion in the Google ‘About this score’ option and warnings for low quality data blanksas well as a new partnership on information literacy lesson plans for middle and high school students.
Excerpts appear within many searches, but since they appear to directly answer questions by quoting pages, they can counterproductive ways Standard query responses would not do that. In a presentation to journalists, Google gave some examples of these problems and how they are trying to solve them. When you’re looking up the time it takes for light to get from the Sun to Earth, for example, Google at one point showed a snippet highlighting the distance from Pluto instead.
The solution, according to Search VP Pandu Nayak, is to find consensus: facts that match across multiple search results. In a call with reporters, Nayak explained that this consensus check comes from pages already rated by Google as high quality, something Google hopes to avoid an excerpt equivalent to bombard google. “It doesn’t prove anything to be trustworthy, it just looks around for the best results,” says Nayak. But by looking at the many pages that Google already trusts, and then trying to find the commonalities, it hopes to avoid highlighting the wrong details.
A separate issue is the “false hypothesis” issue, a phenomenon in which Google tries to be a bit very Useful with extracts. For years, if you’ve entered a key question about something that never happened, Google has repeatedly shown snippets that seem to confirm its facts, extracting out-of-context bits of text from a semi-related page. The research team’s example, for example, is “When Did Snoopy Assassinate Abraham Lincoln,” which at one point displayed the date of Lincoln’s death in a snippet. Google describes these instances as “not very common,” but says it’s training its systems to get better at detecting them and not providing a featured snippet at all, and it promises to reduce the incidence of these inappropriate appearances by 40 percent.
This does not necessarily solve every problem in the snippets. Nayak acknowledged that neither system would help solve an issue identified last year that Google offered to Accurately reverse good advice On dealing with seizures, and including a series of “no” taboos as guidelines for what to do. “This kind of thing is really about making sure that our underlying algorithms appropriately extract enough context,” says Nayak, who says Google continues to make improvements that can prevent similar issues from occurring.
But the goal is to reduce snippets more often and increase trust in search results, something that other changes at Google underscore. For about a year, Google has owned Warnings have been set Top unreliable search results can happen in breaking news situations. These instances are now being extended to more general situations where you determine that there are no high-quality search results, adding a consultant before letting people scroll down the page to see the results. It does not prevent anyone from seeing the content, but it perfectly helps to manage expectations about the reliability of the information.
Google is also expanding About This Page, which allows you to see details about the website that a particular result is coming from. The option was up until now on search, but it’s now turned on in the Google app for iOS in English — you can swipe up as you browse any page through the app to see more details about it, which in theory helps you gauge its credibility. The system launches on Android later this year and in other languages over the coming months.
“Alcohol maven. Evil bacon lover. Wannabe social media geek. Travel guru. Amateur introvert. Pop culture nerd.”