A low-hanging improvement Google can do easily: a one-line warning that its smart results may be wrong, and caution people to check all result pages and domains.
Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.
An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century.
But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.
A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.
Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed.
Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.
Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.
An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century.
But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.
A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.
Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed.
Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.