Google Search Featured Snippets Get Quality Improvement With New AI Model
Features snippets are getting a number of improvements including the use of an AI model called MUM to determine information consensus and improve featured snippet quality.
Created on August 11|Last edited on August 11
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A big update to the Google Search results page has been revealed today, improvements ranging from improved systems for fact checking to implementing advisories for results lacking in good information. However, the focal point of today's update is an improvement to the featured snippet section which often provides a convenient answer to the search query at the top of the results page.
The ML Model improving featured snippets
To improve the quality of the information displayed by featured snippets, Google has implemented a new machine learning model which should give it an understanding of information consensus. The information displayed by featured snippets has always leveraged information from sources deemed reliable, but now even more emphasis will be put on relaying information that's supported by a range of sources - the consensus.
The model will additionally work to improve the quality of the snippet callout (the big bold text that gives you the fact clean and simple). Regardless of how any source words or phrases their answer to the same question, the model will understand what the ultimate fact of the matter is and interpret and display it in a way that's simple and easy to understand.
AL models are also helping to mitigate occurrences where a featured snippet is shown when it shouldn't be, such as with the example query (from their blog post) "when did snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln" giving accurate information about Lincoln's assassination, even though snoopy obviously wasn't the perpetrator.
The model that's driving a lot of these new improvements is called Multitask Unified Model (MUM), which was first introduced in May of last year. MUM is a model that was first developed to help answer complex questions in multimodal understanding, and now powers Featured Snippets' information consensus ability.
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