Google's Big Plan to Fix the Often-Bizarre Info Boxes That Appear Above Search Results

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Google's "featured snippets"--those info boxes at the top of search results that display things like basic biographical information for prominent people, or the wrong way to caramelize onions--have long been a source of confusion. Why, for instance, would Google so confidently state that President Warren G. Harding was a member of the KKK? Now Google, long notorious for its lack of transparency, has launched a behind-the-scenes series to explain what goes into a search, starting with the announcement that it's trying to correct the "featured snippets" function. It claims that the feature currently has a failure rate of just 2.6 percent--not bad, until you realize that with 3.5 billion queries being processed every day, that means 91 million searches' worth of bogus information.