How Google could fix Featured Snippets

21 April 2017

It looks like the inaccuracy of Google's Featured Snippets is becoming quite the news in recent times. What sticks out at me is that Google is avoiding intervening with the snippets to correct them, and rather decides to disable the Featured Snippet for questions altogether when there is a problem. Here is what I think Google could be doing to resolve this situation.

  1. Manually blacklisting sites. Unreliable sites like Breitbart, and some outright fake news sites, should be manually blacklisted by Google from being used for Featured Snippets. If a site is identified as being fake, it makes no sense to simply remove the answers one-by-one, rather, the entire site should be removed from the snippet system.
  2. Looking at site age. Google's system could potentially look up sites in the WHOIS database to see the age of the sites being considered for Featured Snippets. If a site is very new, it's probably fake, and should not be allowed to appear in Featured Snippets.
  3. Blacklisting public web hosting sites. Considering that I'm someone whose site is currently a subdomain of neocities.org, this may seem surprising. However, it is obviously true that sites on wordpress.com, angelfire.com, weebly.com, etc. tend to be not as reliable as sites with their own domains, so they should be blacklisted.
  4. And finally, choosing reliable sites in the first place. It appears that Google already does this to an extent with medical information (e.g. choosing mayoclinic.org rather than a site that may be higher-up in the results), but this needs to be done with all Featured Snippets. Google could have humans create a list of reliable news sites, and then their algorithm could choose them with as many snippets as possible.

There is very little chance that anybody from Google will look at this, but in my opinion, these ideas could be used very effectively by Google to improve their Featured Snippets system.