21–29 of 29 posts
The snippets feature has always seemed somewhat shady to me -- in essence, it steals pageviews from the websites that did the hard work of sourcing the information.
The fact that Google doesn’t immediately change bad data for queries is extremely scary to me. Misinformation from a query should be a civil offense, similar to libel or slander. They are effectively causing disruption in lives these days and I’m perfectly okay with Google being sued directly for spreading misinformation. If their algorithm doesn’t work, it shouldn’t be a public, they can’t just say “nope sorry that’…
The information in the snippet was correct.
> “In situations where people are searching for something like a phone number that is not readily available online, our systems are understanding these pages (that include those exact keywords plus a phone number) to be the best matches available, even if the phone number is not the correct number for that entity,” Lara Levin, a spokesperson for Google, said in an email. This is completely depressing. I would really…
It would seem like something they could figure out, but I'm guessing there's a lot of 'contact us' pages that have the phone number and rank well for the keyword, but don't have the keyword near the phone number.
They should probably have a 'this isn't correct' link in the snippet or something to trigger review of it, but Google is alergic to humans in the loop.
The snippets feature has always seemed somewhat shady to me -- in essence, it steals pageviews from the websites that did the hard work of sourcing the information.
Last year I had the opportunity to work with some Xooglers. According to their CVs an Linkedin they were with Google for a year or two. All with job titles that trim down to project managers. All very junior. Still, considering that Google only hires the best of the best I expected to work with ambitious, clever people. They were the worst. The showed me graphs, fancy presentations and project plans in some saas tool…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my (probably naive) point of view this does seem like a useful feature for users. If you can get an accurate answer for your query without clicking on a link or having to grep the linked page for the answer that's a win in my book and a time save for users. I guess an issue arises when the snippet is _not_ correct. But in my personal experience, the snippets are usually pretty helpful/accurate
Snippets are indeed a useful feature to have, but Google should share some of the ad revenue it generates with the publishers of the featured content snippets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snippets are indeed a useful feature to have, but Google should share some of the ad revenue it generates with the publishers of the featured content snippets.
They do indeed generate revenue for the publishers, because a fraction of the users actually click through into the article. Without the snippet promoting it, the article would see much fewer traffic from Google.