• Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Google’s featured snippet thing is not only a bad feature, it’s actively causing harm. It’s extremely unreliable, but people who aren’t tech literate, which is most people, think “well it’s Google, so it must be right.” Sometimes it’s obviously wrong in a funny way, but more often, it’s doing something like parroting dangerous medical misinformation. To make things worse, it’s very likely to answer a question, which is the search form preferred by the technologically illiterate, with a yes. I would go so far as to say they should be sued for gross negligence for implementing it. It’s killed people, when antivaxxers say they “did their own research”, there’s a good chance it was a Google featured snippet reinforcing their claim.

    • Kilgore Trout@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      5 months ago

      It’s going to be more and more unreliable as the results it’s snipping from are increasingly machine-generated.