Google will stop giving snappy answers to stupid questions, the company has announced, as it looks to improve its search engine’s “highlights” service.
That means users should see fewer answers to questions like “When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?”, to which the service would once cheerfully answer with “1865” — the right date, but very much the wrong assassin .
“This is clearly not the most useful way to display this result,” the company’s head of search, Pandu Nayak, said in a blog post announcing the changes. “We have trained our systems to improve detection of these types of false premises, which are not very common, but there are cases where it is not useful to show a featured snippet. We have reduced the activation of featured snippets in these cases by 40% with this update.”
Snippets, which sometimes appear as a featured answer to direct questions asked in Google Search, have long been a cornerstone of the company’s AI strategy. The same technology powers its smart speakers and voice assistants and allows the search engine to satisfy search queries without visitors clicking through to other websites.
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But snippets, which are automatically generated from website content, have also been a thorn in Google’s side for the same amount of time. In 2017, the company was accused of spreading “fake news” after a featured snippet for the query “Is Obama planning a coup?” prompted its voice assistant to gleefully tell users: ” In fact, Obama may be planning a communist coup.” been at the end of his term in 2016,” after finding the information on a conspiracy website.
Other mistakes have been more comical. The company would tell users that 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 he asked, “Why are fire trucks red?”
In an effort to address the root cause of these errors, Google is also rolling out new warnings for times when a search term has reached a “data gap,” a question where a good answer may simply not exist.
“It looks like there aren’t many great results for this search,” the site now warns users who answered that query.
“This does not mean that there is no useful information available or that a particular result is of low quality,” says Nayak. “These warnings provide context about the entire result set on the page, and you can always see the results of your query, even when the warning is present.”