You wouldn’t believe what I found on Google while searching for “gag gift meaning”.
There has been a paradigm shift in the way Google serves results to its users since the inclusion of Knowledge Graph in late 2012.
In 2013, Google started serving results within an Answer Box at the top, a feature Google has been trying to improve further, hinting at a revolutionary change in the way we will experience Google Search moving forward. Basically, this also means Google is trying to offer a quick answer to searchers that don’t want to dig down deep.
In this exhaustive and informative slideshare, Dr. Pete from Moz has explained how Google Search has evolved since the early days.
Razvan Gavrilas from Cognitive SEO has written this post at length explaining dynamics behind Google’s Answer Box.
However, since Google has to address billions of queries on a daily basis, and it relies on various sources to fetches answers for its Answer Box, it might be possible that Google might go way off at times.
In this comprehensive test on the accuracy of Google’s Answer Box, Dan showed several cases where Google’s Answer Box was offering less-than-ideal results.
Recently, Dr. Pete at Moz, while answering a comment from a contributor, lamented how Google is scraping answers from other websites and showing them within the Answer Box.
“My opinion is this – Google has an unspoken agreement with webmasters, and it goes something like: “We’ll make money off of your content, but in return we’ll send you traffic.” That’s fair, in theory, and many of us have done well by it. Now, though, Google is making $60,000,000,000 off of that exchange, and they’re becoming more interested in how to protect/grow that number than honor the agreement. I think these scraped answer boxes are crossing a line, personally.”, he said.
How Reliable/Accurate is Google’s Answer Box?
While searching for “gag gift meaning” search query, I was surprised and disappointed at the same time, to find the following result: I got in touch with Dr. Pete over Twitter to see what his thoughts were on this, and he shared similar thoughts:
When the new answer boxes go terribly wrong… https://t.co/TrXMDVG945 (h/t @sushantsahoo) — Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) August 27, 2014
It seems like Google does have a lot of issues serving the right answer within the Answer Box. But if you consider the above example, it was downright funny. What are your thoughts on the Google’s Answer Box? Have you come across any egregious examples as such? Please, share them in the comment below!
