[michaelmior]

> If Google wants to go back to being a search engine

While I understand the problems with Google scraping content, as a user these snippets help me find what I'm searching for faster. If that's all you're optimizing for, Google is fantastic. There are certainly good arguments to be made for other models, but for search, stealing content helps. I'm not advocating stealing content, I'm just saying that it produces more useful results.

[elorant]

How do you know that the content Google features is the best there is? If we stop clicking on sites and just rely on Google to provide us the content we'll go down a very slippery slope.

[BigJono]

I don't really see how this problem is any different to 'how do we know the #1 search result is the best content there is?', if it provides you the information you want, then great, otherwise you load #2.

[millstone]

Google lends the weight of its authority to the answers it presents. It's one thing if Infowars says that Obama is planning a coup against Donald Trump, it's another if Google says so.

[w1nst0nsm1th]

Try googling "root M89 tablet".

The first three result lead you to fake android blog telling you how you can easily root every chinese android device and specifically the M89 tablet...

The real authoritative result (xda-developers) only appears in the fourth position, under sight. It will tell you if you follow the instruction given in the fake blog post from the 2 or 3 first results, you will brick your tablet.

In a similar way the word "cbd" (for cannabidiol) has been hijacked by dubious commercial compagnies through fake blog posts filling pages after pages of google results telling you how great cbd is for the treatment of every disease on earth... But there is no trace of an actual study in these results. You will have to go with the less popular word "cannabidiol" to start to see some serious articles about it.

Google results can be hijacked and Google do little about it. May be because the ads shown in these fake blog posts are from google ads network ? I don't know...

But google result have clearly deteriorated these last years and the authoritative figure of the companie is not anymore what it was in the past.

[playpause]

I know that sort of thing happens sometimes (Google presenting a spurious statement as a categorical answer) but those are bugs. As long as they are very rare, and fixed quickly when they occur, I don’t see them causing much harm.

OK, some people believe anything they read (especially if it confirms their existing biases), but that problem has always existed. I think Google’s occasional snippet fuck-ups are a drop in the ocean compared to the spread of false information through social networks.

[millstone]

There's the modern news-cycle axis, where Google can and should devote full-time engineers.

But the long tail is important too. It's fixed now (yay) but for years you could search for "calories in corn" and Google would confidently present an answer 5x the true value, scraped from a site with profoundly wrong information. As Google moves to present more direct answers and fewer links, this risk increases.

It looks like they have backed off on the direct answers somewhat which is good news.

[DollarGuru]

If it undermines the websites producing the content Google is scraping by not sending through traffic then those sites may not continue to exist.

[londons_explore]

This is already happening.

Very few new blogs and content websites are being set up.

All content is moving into apps and walled gardens. Part of the reason for that is that running a well researched blog will never pay for your time, so becomes a hobby thing, and most people are fine to use Facebook for that.