Google announced several updates for making Google Search Results more prompt, and accurate and how users view them according to priority. Google brought improvements to ‘featured snippets’, ‘about this result’ and ‘content advisories’.
Featured Snippets appear at the top of Google Search results. These snippets appear for certain queries that are answered quickly. Improvement for the featured snippets is now focusing on yes/no or short sentence callouts. This is also known as featured snippet callouts.
Google introduced Multitask Unified Model (MUM) for such callouts. MUM will now help understand if there is a general consensus for details Google Search shows as callouts in such snippets. Google said that “systems can check snippet callouts” against other high-quality sources on the web, to see if there’s a general consensus for that callout.
The new look of the Featured Snippet is shown below
Reduced false premise queries by 40 per cent
Google is also working on if it should show Featured Snippets in the first place, in response to false premises. ‘False premise’ queries refer to those questions which are incorrect or false but are not used by some searchers in Google Search. Google said it has improved what featured snippets it shows for queries that contain information for things that never occurred.
With the upcoming updates, Google will show accurate information and eliminate the false part. The tech giant said it had cut down these occurrences for triggering featured snippets by about 40 per cent in Google Search.
More to ‘About this result’ and ‘Content Advisories’
Google added more languages to its ‘About This Result’ section with the latest update — Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese and Indonesian.
Google launched content advisories in Google Search in 2020. Content advisories will now appear when Google is not confident enough about the overall quality of the results available for the search. Nevertheless, one can still scroll down for results.