Google will stop answering users’ absurd questions

“When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?” Google will stop responding via so-called featured snippet to this and others absurd questions, also posed by users to make the search engine fall into comic errors. The snippets are i results highlighted by Google, in a special box at the top of the search results page, with which it tries to answer users’ questions in a concise and immediate manner, extracting information from the websites that contain them.

These elements have long been one of the most important parts behind many of the company’s artificial intelligence functions: the same technology makes smart speakers and voice assistants work, but above all allows the search engine to fulfill search requests without visitors clicking on other websites. Having said that, the snippets, precisely because they were generated automatically through content extracted from different websites, have also been a source of several problems for Google.

For example, in the 2017, the company found itself at the center of strong criticism for spreading fake news, when its voice assistant accused the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, of plotting a Communist coup to stay in power after the end of his mandate. Indeed, to the question “Is Obama planning a coup?” the featured snippet they made thevoice assistant that “Obama may indeed be planning a Communist coup at the end of his term in 2016“ after finding the information on a website spreading conspiracy theories.