Google’s featured snippet thing is not only a bad feature, it’s actively causing harm. It’s extremely unreliable, but people who aren’t tech literate, which is most people, think “well it’s Google, so it must be right.” Sometimes it’s obviously wrong in a funny way, but more often, it’s doing something like parroting dangerous medical misinformation. To make things worse, it’s very likely to answer a question, which is the search form preferred by the technologically illiterate, with a yes. I would go so far as to say they should be sued for gross negligence for implementing it. It’s killed people, when antivaxxers say they “did their own research”, there’s a good chance it was a Google featured snippet reinforcing their claim.
But this screenshot is old if even real. I googled it and the snippet was much more realistic and detailed.
More to your point::
One snippet I recently saw that was wrong was the result for ‘population of Gaza.’ It showed the population of Gaza city, which is tiny fraction of Gaza.
Google’s featured snippet thing is not only a bad feature, it’s actively causing harm. It’s extremely unreliable, but people who aren’t tech literate, which is most people, think “well it’s Google, so it must be right.” Sometimes it’s obviously wrong in a funny way, but more often, it’s doing something like parroting dangerous medical misinformation. To make things worse, it’s very likely to answer a question, which is the search form preferred by the technologically illiterate, with a yes. I would go so far as to say they should be sued for gross negligence for implementing it. It’s killed people, when antivaxxers say they “did their own research”, there’s a good chance it was a Google featured snippet reinforcing their claim.
Sorry, you’re not wrong about the misinformation and how removal from context can change the meaning of the he snippet. This is just my favourite.
It’s going to be more and more unreliable as the results it’s snipping from are increasingly machine-generated.
This is true.
But this screenshot is old if even real. I googled it and the snippet was much more realistic and detailed.
More to your point::
One snippet I recently saw that was wrong was the result for ‘population of Gaza.’ It showed the population of Gaza city, which is tiny fraction of Gaza.