Google Has Picked an Answer for You-Too Bad It's Often Wrong - WSJ - 1 views
www.wsj.com/...-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867
google search engines search information bias social media knowledge
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Google became the world’s go-to source of information by ranking billions of links from millions of sources. Now, for many queries, the internet giant is presenting itself as the authority on truth by promoting a single search result as the answer.
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Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., handles almost all internet searches. Featured snippets appear on about 40% of results for searches formed as questions
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They give Google’s secret algorithms even greater power to shape public opinion, given that surveys show people consider search engines their most-trusted source of information, over traditional media or social media.
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Google’s featured answers are feeding a raging global debate about the ability of Silicon Valley companies to influence society. Google and other internet giants are under intensifying scrutiny over the power of their products and their vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
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Featured snippets are “generated algorithmically and [are] a reflection of what people are searching for and what’s available on the web,” the company said in an April blog post. “This can sometimes lead to results that are unexpected, inaccurate or offensive.”
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The promoted answers, called featured snippets, are outlined in boxes above other results and presented in larger type, often with images. Google’s voice assistant sometimes reads them aloud
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An algorithm chooses featured snippets from websites in part by how closely they appear to satisfy a user’s question, factoring in Google’s measure of a source’s authority and its ranking in the search results.
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By answering questions directly, Google aims to make the search engine more appealing to users and the advertisers that chase them. The answers’ real estate is so attractive that there is a budding marketing industry around tailoring content so it becomes a featured snippet.
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as Google expanded the use of featured snippets, it has relied more often on less authoritative sources, such as purveyors of top-10 lists and gossipy clickbait.
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“For them to wield their algorithm like this is very worrisome,” she said. “This is how people learn about the world.”