There has never been a king of the United
States.
But there have been times when Google would
tell you, at the very top of the page, that
there was.
Their source?
A joke headline on a Breitbart article from
2014.
This isn’t the only time something like
this has happened: This Google first-answer
box has told users that dinosaurs never existed,
that God only loves Christians, and that all
Republicans are Nazis.
"According to debate.org, yes, Republicans = Nazis."
So what are these featured search results?
And why can they be so, so bad?
Responses like this are called a featured
snippet.
They’re part of what are called “rich
answers” on Google — answers that are
given special priority beyond the usual list
of links.
If you want to know the score of the latest
Warriors game, or how to say thank you in
Arabic, or check the weather in Guatemala
City, with Rich Answers you don’t actually
have to click on any of the search results.
Those answers are powered by what Google calls
its Knowledge Graph, which is a database of
related search information that was launched
in 2012.
But Featured Snippets are a different thing,
even if they don’t look that different.
Knowledge Graph information is limited to
verified sources like Wikipedia and the CIA’s
World Factbook — but Featured Snippets can
pull information from any third-party website.
That's where results can get tricky, as The
Outline's Adrienne Jeffries has reported.
For a while, when you asked Google why firetrucks
are red, you got back a long Monty Python
joke.
“Right!
Stop that!
Silly.”
Snippet answers are usually from one of the
top search results.
But they don’t have to be: Google places
priority on how directly a statement answers
a question, how many words it takes to do
it, and whether or not it's presented in a
simple list.
Engagement factors like how often people visit
a site and how long they spend on it also
play a part.
So when you ask a question like “how to
cook asparagus,” the featured answer isn’t
the first answer.
It’s the tenth.
But that site does format the answer in a
simple bulleted list, and answer the query
directly.
Google guesses which part of the page most
directly answers your question, and quotes
that portion in the snippet box.
Problem is, the Snippets aren’t always right
— users have asked questions like “Is
Obama planning a coup” or “which presidents
were in the Ku Klux Klan”, and gotten back
Featured Snippets from really bad parts of
the internet.
One thing we do know is that the sites in
these Featured Snippets change a lot.
Of the answers with snippets in January 2016,
more than 55 percent either didn’t have
a featured snippet or featured a different
URL just six months earlier.
What that means is that Google has an automated
process that decides whether or not to keep
snippets based on how they perform.
In addition to the user-reported “Feedback”
button, Google also has several thousand contractors
who review search results pages on how well
they answer questions.
Rich Answers make up a big part of Google’s
overall strategy — a group called Stone
Temple Consulting conducted a study where
they entered 1.4 million queries into Google
and found that about 30 percent of questions
returned answers that pulled from the Knowledge
Graph or Featured Snippets.
Featured Snippets are a key part of what gives
Google’s voice search and Google Home an
edge over other digital assistants.
Danny Sullivan, who runs a blog called Search
Engine Land, demonstrated this by asking both
Google Home and Amazon Echo whether or not
he could feed his guinea pig grapes:
Amazon’s device, which pulls answers from
Bing, couldn’t answer, but Google’s could.
The reason why?
It’s a Featured Snippet.
So yes, these snippets can go wrong, and they’re
going to require a lot of algorithm policing
from Google.
But they’re a key part of their strategy
to provide answers that are useful and sound
natural — so don’t expect them to go away
anytime soon.
So Google is pretty good about fixing these mistakes when they've happened.
But sometimes when they think they've fixed something, the answer is still actually wrong.
After Searchengineland.com wrote about how ridiculous it was that Google was citing Breibart
as saying that Obama was the king of America, the snippet changed.
And instead it cited Searchengineland.com.
But it still said that Obama was the king of America.
