Engadget: Google’s Search AI now looks for general consensus to highlight more trustworthy results. “Google’s Search AI can now check snippet callouts — those are the information with larger fonts that serve as heading for featured snippets — against other high-quality sources online.”
Search Engine Roundtable: Google Adds Pros & Cons To Search Result Snippets. “Normally when someone sends me a sophisticated search result snippet from Google and I dig in, I find a reason for how Google came up with this snippet. But it seems like in this case below, Google is being a bit more sophisticated and showing pros and cons in the snippet without the web site having mentioned pros and cons specifically.” Today in “What could possibly go wrong”….
Search Engine Journal: Google SEO 101: Here’s How to Update Your Search Results Snippets. “Google‘s latest ‘Search for Beginners’ video is a crash course on how to create effective snippets for search results. Given that the information is geared toward beginners, what’s covered in the video may already be known to experienced SEOs. If you’re new to SEO, or want to refresh your knowledge of search snippets, here is a quick recap of the video.”
Search Engine Journal: Google Featured Snippets: A 2020 SEO Guide. “For several years now, SEO professionals have shared common best practices used to earn these coveted paragraph, list, or table results. But Google has unveiled a handful of new updates to featured snippets in the past couple of years, which affect which content is selected and how the snippets appear in the search results.”
Search Engine Land: Google launches new algorithm to better understand useful & timely information. “This new update aims at making sure that the answers Google gives you for some questions are not just accurate but also timely. Google confirmed that this algorithm update aims at better understanding useful and timely information.”
Reuters: EU countries back copyright reform targeting Google, Facebook. “The European Union’s bid to overhaul its two-decade old copyright rules cleared its final hurdle on Monday as EU governments backed the move forcing Google to pay publishers for news snippets and Facebook to filter out protected content.”
The Guardian: Google News may shut over EU plans to charge tax for links. “Google’s top news executive has refused to rule out shutting down Google News in EU countries, as the search engine faces a battle with Brussels over plans to charge a ‘link tax’ for using news stories.” This discussion has been happening since at least 2015. Somebody ask Spain how it went.
Google Blog: Get verified to manage your presence on Google. “When you search for well-known people, organizations and things on Google, you’ll often come across a Knowledge Panel on the results page—a box with an overview of key information and links to resources to help you go deeper. Individuals and organizations with Knowledge Panels can use our verification process to claim their panels and provide authoritative feedback on the information and images presented. Now we’re updating that process as well as extending verification eligibility to more entities.”
Wired: Encyclopædia Britannica Wants To Fix False Google Results . “Snippets aren’t all bad. When you ask Google why the sky is blue, it offers a reasonable explanation: ‘Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth’s atmosphere,’ an answer it sourced from NASA. But in many other circumstances, Google has instead featured incorrect information from Wikipedia and random blogs. It’s those failures that Britannica wants to help mitigate with its new Chrome extension, Britannica Insights, which supplements Google’s featured snippets with accurate information.”
SEO Roundtable: Google Cuts Down Search Snippets By Half. “Less than six months ago, Google increased the max characters shown in the search results snippets box to 320 characters but now it seems Google has cut it down to 160 or less characters over the past week. I’ve been hearing for the past week that Google is showing searchers a lot fewer details or characters in the search results snippet, but waited it out because Google is always testing stuff.”
Search Engine Roundtable: Google Shows Answer Without Any Search Results. “Google is showing answers in the search results without showing any organic listings or ads or anything but the answer. Yehoshua Coren posted on Twitter a screen shot of him going to Google and Google returning the answer and a button to show search results.” This makes me nervous. Not about showing just the time or the result of a math question, but it seems to me like a slippery slope. How far until we get an answer Google has scraped from another Web site and no organic results at all?
Search Engine Land: Multifaceted featured snippets begin rolling out in Google search results. “Multifaceted featured snippets will be surfaced for queries that are sufficiently broad enough to allow for more than one interpretation of what was submitted. In these instances, the SERP returned will include more than one featured snippet, with the original query rewritten as the questions the algorithm assumes the user may have intended, and the results displayed in the multifaceted snippet will reflect those new questions.” This article also examines Bing’s changes to its snippets – and while I like what both new features do, I think in our current climate Bing’s is more important.
SEO Roundtable: Bing Multi-Perspective Answers – Like Two Featured Snippets. “Bing wrote about their new Multi-Perspective Answers for their Intelligent Answers set. This is similar to what Google calls ‘featured snippets,’ in case you were wondering. In this case, Bing may show two different answers from two different perspectives side by side. “
Search Engine Journal: Fact Checking Google’s Reintroduction to Featured Snippets. “Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Liaison for Search, published an article titled, A Reintroduction to Google’s Featured Snippets. He shared the basics about what featured snippets are, when they show up and how they are currently still evolving. But he also left out some telling details. This article reviews what he said then fills in the gaps on what he left out.”
Search Engine Land: Google publishes comprehensive guide to featured snippets. “Google has published one of the most comprehensive explanations yet of their featured snippets in a post on the search blog. Featured snippets, in short, are the quick direct answers you see at the top of the Google search results page that appear in response to some search queries. In this blog post, Google explains what featured snippets are, the various user interfaces and treatments you can get from these featured snippets and how they interact with desktop, mobile and voice search results.”
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