Google’s featured snippets feature came under first last year for showing highly inaccurate and even offensive results in some cases. The company has now said that it has improved the featured snippets feature in Search to ensure that inaccurate results are not given the spotlight. Google has never intended featured snippets to be the sole source of information which is why it always displays regular search listings in response to queries alongside the snippets.
Google introduced featured snippets to search back in January 2014. They are displayed at the very top ahead of the regular listings and enable users to easily discover the information they’re seeking. The feature has proven to be particularly helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.
The feature was criticized last year for featuring snippets that claimed that former President Barack Obama was planning a coup and that “women are evil,” Google says that it failed in those cases because it didn’t weigh the authoritativeness of results strongly enough for rare queries.
The company has since improved its systems to better identify misleading information, offensive results, and unsupported conspiracy theories in order to prevent such information from being displayed in a featured snippet.
Google is also considering other methods to improve the accuracy of information that’s surfaced in this feature. One such method is “near matches,” snippets close enough to what the user searched for but not exactly what they were trying to find out.
One such example Google provides is for the query “how did the Romans tell time at night,” the result surfaces a snippet which explains they used a sundial, which would be of no use at night. This is actually related to the query “how did Romans tell time,” but its displayed as a near match anyway.
In instances like these, a single featured snippet isn’t right to provide the full picture, which is why Google has designed a format to show more than one featured snippet that’s related to what users originally searched for.
“There are often legitimate diverse perspectives offered by publishers, and we want to provide users visibility and access into those perspectives from multiple sources,” said Matthew Gray, the software engineer who leads the featured snippets team at Google.
Google is testing these features right now and may only roll out some of them depending on the results.
Filed in . Read more about Google. Source: blog.google