Google Search improving Featured Snippet callouts with MUM and consensus

Google today announced a series of updates on improving information quality and literacy in Search, starting with Featured Snippet callouts.

Featured Snippets are what appear at the top of Google Search results for certain queries that can be answered quickly. This “significant innovation to improve the quality” is focusing on the one-word (i.e. yes/no) or short sentence callouts.

Using its Multitask Unified Model (MUM), Google can understand consensus and see if there is one for a Snippet callout:

Our systems can check snippet callouts (the word or words called out above the featured snippet in a larger font) 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.

Google Search is also getting better at determining whether to show Featured Snippets in the first place, especially in response to “false premises.”

This is particularly helpful for questions where there is no answer: for example, a recent search for “when did snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln” provided a snippet highlighting an accurate date and information about Lincoln’s assassination, but this clearly isn’t the most helpful way to display this result.

On the information literacy front, Google is bringing About this result to eight more languages this year: Portuguese (PT), French (FR), Italian (IT), German (DE), Dutch (NL), Spanish (ES), Japanese (JP) and Indonesian (ID).

Used 2.4 billion times since launching last year to provide more context about a site before visiting, About this result is adding new information like: “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.” It’s also now easier to access on the Google app (for iOS) with a swipe up instead of just the three-dot menu.

Lastly, content advisories will now appear when Google’s “systems don’t have high confidence in the overall quality of the results available for the search.” However, you’re still able to scroll down and see results.

More on Google Search:

• Google Search results now better emphasize words you put in quotes
• Google testing large favicons and site names in mobile Search, Discover
• ‘New Google.com’ adds weather, news, and other cards, enters wider testing [U]