Google will stop giving snappy answers to stupid questions, as it seeks to improve its search engine's featured snippets service.
Users should see fewer answers to questions such as When did Snoopy murder Abraham Lincoln? The service would once merrily respond to the right date of 1865, but very much the wrong assassin.
The company s head of search, Pandu Nayak, stated in a blog post that this isn't the most helpful way to display this result. We have trained our systems to detect false premises, which are not very common, but there are cases where it is not helpful to show a featured snippet. We have reduced the trigger of featured snippets in these cases by 40% with this update. The search engine has the ability to satisfy search queries without having to go away from other websites, thanks to the same technology that powers its smart speakers and voice assistants.
The snippets generated automatically from the contents of websites have been a thorn in Google's side for just as long. In 2017 the company was accused of spreading fake news after a featured snippet for the question Is Obama planning a coup? The voice assistant told users: Obama may actually be planning a communist coup d tat at the end of his term in 2016 after it found the information on a conspiracy website.
Other errors have been comical. The company would tell users that the stairs were invented in 1946 after reading a website that attributed a particular US safety regulation to that date or unknowingly repeat a Monty Python joke when asked: Why are firetrucks red? In an effort to address the root cause of such mistakes, Google is rolling out new warnings for times when a search term has hit a data void a question where a good answer might not exist.
The site warns users who hit such a query, it looks like there aren't many great results for this search.
Nayak says that this does not mean that no useful information is available, or that a particular result is low-quality. You can see the results for your query even when the advisory is present, because these notices give context about the whole set of results on the page.