Search engine updates ‘featured snippets’ to reduce the number of often comical errors it makes
Google will stop giving snappy answers to stupid questions, the company has announced, as it seeks to improve its search engine’s “featured snippets” service.
That means users should see fewer answers to questions such as “When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?”, to which the service would once merrily respond with “1865” – the right date, but very much the wrong assassin. “This clearly isn’t the most helpful way to display this result,” said the company’s head of search, Pandu Nayak,. “We’ve trained our systems to get better at detecting these sorts of false premises, which are not very common, but there are cases where it’s not helpful to show a featured snippet. We’ve reduced the triggering of featured snippets in these cases by 40% with this update.”
Snippets, which sometimes show up as a featured response to direct questions asked of Google Search, have long been a cornerstone of the company’s AI strategy. The same technology powers its smart speakers and voice assistants, and lets the search engine satisfy search queries without visitors clicking away to other websites.
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