The tech giant says the technique 'has meaningfully improved the quality and helpfulness' of its featured snippets.

You know that highlighted piece of text at the very top of a Google search results page when you look up a piece of information? That's called a "featured snippet," and it's meant to provide you with a quick answer to your query. Now, Google is making sure that the information it highlights is reliable and accurate by using its latest AI model, the Multitask Unified Model, so that Search can now look for consensus when deciding on a snippet to feature.

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. It can figure out if there's a general consensus for that callout, even if sources use different words or concepts to describe the same fact or idea. Google says this "consensus-based technique has meaningfully improved the quality and helpfulness of featured snippet callouts."

Google featured snippet

But for some queries, such as those with false premises, displaying features snippets isn't the best way to deliver information. To address that issue, Google tweaked its Search AI so that this particular update reduces the triggering of snippets for those types of queries by 40 percent.

Google is now also making its "About this result" tool, which shows you details about the source website before you even visit by clicking on three dots next to the result, more accessible. Starting later this year, it will be available in eight more languages, including Portuguese (PT), French (FR), Italian (IT), German (DE), Dutch (NL), Spanish (ES), Japanese (JP) and Indonesian (ID). It's adding more information to the tool starting this week, as well, including how widely publications are circulated, online reviews about a company, or whether a company is owned by another entity. They're all pieces of information that could help you decide whether a particular source is trustworthy.

In case Google's AI has determined that the overall results for a search query may have questionable quality, the results page will now display a content advisory telling you to make sure to check the source you're looking at or to try other search terms. It could help you stay alert and keep an eye out for potential fake information.

Source:
courtesy of ENGADGET

by Mariella Moon

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