A Brief History of Featured Snippets from Google

A Brief History of Featured Snippets from Google

The Featured Snippet was created due to a problem that originated in the early days of searches on the internet. Pre-Google (Google first), and many other search engines including Yahoo are still curated by human directory results.

When content creation has doubled in size, humans can no longer follow and curate it. In addition, certainly the best curation is needed that is near real-time or actual. This is the beginning of the use of algorithmic techniques and curation by machines.

When Google releases the Knowledge Graph, the data is entirely based on results categorized or curated by humans, such as Freebase and Wiki data. You can see that the data is in traditional "Knowledge Cards", commonly referred to as "answer boxes".

Previously, you could see the entry result for "CEO: Sundar Pichai". This is not just a mediocre text box. These results are called factoid. Each such line item is all the factoids that exist separately as a unified data entity in the Knowledge Graph. You can test it by running searches that contradict other factoids, such as "When was Google established?".

While Google does a good job of matching so many questions with the answers to the Knowledge Graph, they can not escape the limits that can only be overcome by human capabilities. This is certainly due to the limitations of engine curation. So, there are just questions that do not fit the simple "factoid" model like the example we gave earlier.

The solution from Google is simple, if the question is too difficult then the millions or billions of pages in the index will be sorted to generate answers quickly. Thus, the result of the answer is a page containing the words that exist in the question itself. This process is called on-page copy. So, often the results do not fit.

The result is often not connected with the question you enter into the search field. But this is what Google can do. However, it is not as simple as that of course the index process is done also see the relevance of the page and others.

In addition to the featured snippets we have shown above, there is also tabular data. Tabular data is usually a table that appears in a snippet. Actually this is not a structured data sort of Knowledge Graph, just plain HTML text. discord servers