On top of all that, Google's snippets aren't curated and therefore, aren't always correct. They can be (and almost certainly are) gamed. Users that don't click through open themselves up to carrying on being misinformed.
Turns out I didn't have optic neuritis.
I don't, either.
A site I used to own had a discussion forum on it. It contained a message along the lines of "Real Estate Agent X is a great guy. Real Estate Agent Y is a complete sleazebag."
The blurb that Google displayed for it was "Real Estate Agent X... is a sleazebag." And that was the first result for anyone who searched for that agent's name.
As you can imagine, I received many angry e-mails, phone calls, and legal threats. No, you can't explain to angry people that it's "just" an algorithm that told the world that they're a sleazebag.
I ended up editing the post so that Google would display a different version after its next scrape.
I think it gives that one-shot answer to questions people have, even when the real answer is nuanced and multi-faceted.
Then the snippets show up, and they are presented in a similarly trust worthy fashion. But the snippets are really just the really just the result of which ever site has the best SEO, and that’s often a really worthless metric these days. The time zone and currency stuff is easy, because it’s math, but opinions aren’t. The thing is though that even if google didn’t have the snippets, those sites that gets snippets would still be the top results that we clicked, and we’d still get the wrong information. That would probably be better, because it might be easier to spot obvious bad sources, but I still think there is just a fundamental flaw in how SEO professionals have learned to game the google bot to bring the world useless information.
I mean, part of it is certainly on google. No one in their right mind wants to comply with Google’s ranking terms, unless you make money from google searches. Which means a lot of useful personal blogs have dropped off the face of the internet, unless you’re really lucky to see them linked on a place like HN.
I wish libraries would band together and make a privacy focused and curated search engine, because librarians are actually kind of good at finding you the correct information.
Yes, but even when they are curated the curators are usually unreliable and sometimes malicious.
Although sometimes the site is actually correct and Google still gets it wrong by copying the info incorrectly or losing some context or qualifiers.
I loved zero-click results back when DucfDuckGo first introduced them, but I'm less enthusiastic about Google's implementation of them.
And anything Google does, is done at vast scale, which makes me, at least, think it might be substantially affecting society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/they-turn-to-...
The “therefore” is misplaced; curated snippets aren't always correct, either.