Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
theoutline.com
Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
1–10 of 192 posts
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#2This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#3[deleted]
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#4This is all mostly because google went from search engine indexing other people's stuff to site that you go to to get answers (whether those answers are based on copyright infringement or not is another matter).
A similar thing happens in Google news where stuff from sites like breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources making it look as though they are of a similar degree of quality.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#5I'd like to read the article but it's so irritating to have it only load a page at a time on my iPad that it's unreadable.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#6This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
Ya, I really don't see how they can justify displaying other people's content. They did the work, but they don't get the clicks or ad revenue or even a chance to keep the user on the site.
I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#7I can't say I've encountered many of these examples as shown in the article, but perhaps that is because I don't search for nazi-like content.
I can't see myself in a situation where I'd ever have to ask myself, "Who is the king of America?", at the same time I have had some good experiences in terms of Google being able to snatch snippets directly from page body that answer my question as if Google itself was talking to me.
Good, and bad. It will always happen. No matter my opinion, I'd love to see for Google, and any other search engine, to tackle low-quality content that's only built to promote ad revenue.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#8This is a great set of examples of this problem.
Of course, the offered solution is "hire a bunch of people to check the facts", which seems to be underestimating the scale of this issue for humans, and perhaps overestimating the difficulty of classifying credibility.
Considering that Google's bread and butter is general site credibility, having some "truthiness vector" added into the mix doesn't seem impossible?
Someone might say "why does Google decide who is credible", but they already do this through the search results anyways. They just don't seem to be able to differentiate between something matching a search, and something being factually accurate.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#9I came across this issue just now when searching for "ec2 pricing" - the featured snippet links to https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ instead of https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/, which looks close enough to the correct URL that I didn't notice it was the wrong page until I realised I couldn't find costs for i3 (which just came out). I'm surprised that no one at Google has fixed it yet; surely there are at least some Google engineers that use AWS for personal projects.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#10I'd like to read the article but it's so irritating to have it only load a page at a time on my iPad that it's unreadable.
Very bad page on Firefox too, if you use the scrollbar (and probably in other ways)...