According to the Guardian, the feature automatically pulls in short answers to common queries from popular websites. It can show them in the search results directly, and is also the basis for the quick answers provided through Google’s smart speaker device, the Google Home.
It is good at answering questions like “who is the richest man in the world” but sometimes pulls from sites sharing fake news, propaganda and simple lies.
Google Home can end up reading same statements as fact, without even the presence of the other search results to provide much needed contextual clues that the answers might be misleading.
At least it names the site where it is getting the information from, but if Facebook is anything to go by most people don’t pay much attention to that. I had to explain to one Facebook friend that the blog “iamabigfatnazi” was probably not a reliable source of information on the Holocaust.
Over the weekend Google Home was answering the question, “is Obama planning a coup” with a conspiracy site called Secrets of the Fed which stated: “According to details exposed in Western Centre for Journalism’s exclusive video, not only could Obama be in bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d’état at the end of his term in 2016!”
Another one about why fire engines are red quoted Monty Python.
“Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight makes twelve, and there are twelve inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and there were fish in the seas, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always “Russian" around, so that's why fire trucks are red!"
A Google spokesperson said: “Featured Snippets in Search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites. Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content. When we are alerted to a Featured Snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance. We apologise for any offense this may have caused.”