Google Featured Snippet Callouts, False Premises, MUM & More

Aug 11, 2022 - 7:51 am 7 by
Filed Under Google

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Google has launched some improvements to featured snippets, about this result and the content advisories in Google Search. MUM now works with featured snippets to help Google understand the notion of consensus and then highlight words in the featured snippets, known as callouts.

I dug deep into this on Search Engine Land, so here is the short version.

Featured Snippet Callouts & MUM for General Consensous

Google featured snippet callouts, the word or words called out above the featured snippet in a larger font, now can be powered by MUM (which is a new and rare use of MUM in search) to check what other sources are saying about the topic. Google said, "our systems can check snippet callouts against other high-quality sources on the web, to see if there's a general consensus for that callout, even if sources use different words or concepts to describe the same thing." "We've found that this consensus-based technique has meaningfully improved the quality and helpfulness of featured snippet callouts," Google told us.

Here is what it looks like:

click for full size

And Pandu Nayak, Vice President of Search and Fellow, Google, told us that it is hard to game consensus here because featured snippets come from the top search results and those generally are not low quality. One note, Pandu said consensus is not a ranking factor (at least not yet) but consensus is being used for callouts in featured snippets.

Featured Snippet & People Also Ask False Premise Queries

False premise queries are when a specific query is for information about things that did not happen. Google will show you information that is accurate and remove the false part from the featured snippet in this case. In fact, Google said they have "reduced the triggering of featured snippets in these cases by 40% with this update."

So if you ask [when did snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln] - snoopy did not do that but Google will tell you who did:

Google Featured Snippet False Premise

This also works for people also ask, because those are built using featured snippets.

About This Result

About this result which launched in February 2021 have been used more than 2.4 billion times Google said.

Google is expanding it to eight more languages including Portuguese (PT), French (FR), Italian (IT), German (DE), Dutch (NL), Spanish (ES), Japanese (JP), and Indonesian (ID), coming later this year.

Plus Google is expanding what it shows in the about this result, adding such as how widely a source is circulated, online reviews about a source or company, whether a company is owned by another entity, or even when our systems can't �find much info about a source.

click for full size

Content Advisories Expand

Content advisories launched in 2020, which tells searchers when Google is not so confident with the search results it is presenting. Well, Google is going to show more of that.

Google said it is expanding content advisories to searches where its systems "do not have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search." Google said this does not mean that there no helpful information is available, or that a pa�rticular result is low-quality. "These notices provide context about the whole set of results on the page, and you can always see the results for your query, even when the advisory is present," Google added.

Google Keyword Expand Text

Here are some of the SEO takes on Twitter:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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