Google has been rolling out a new feature called multifaceted featured snippets to display queries that are broad enough to have only one or a small interpretation. They might have more than one interpretation of what was submitted.
Google Multifaceted Featured Snippets are Live Now
With Google multifaceted featured snippets, Google will return search results that may include more than one featured snippet, with the original query rewritten as the questions the user may have intended. The result displayed in the multifaceted snippet will reflect those new questions.
The feature seems imitated from Bing’s AI-powered multi-perspective answers as part of its “Intelligent Search” set of new features that company rolled out back in December. The feature was meant to include Intelligent Answers, Intelligent Image Search and Conversational Search in search results. These results surface two (or more) authoritative sources on a topic, and will typically include differing perspectives/answers to the query.
As stated, Google multifaceted featured snippets aren’t much different from Bing's AI-powered multi-perspective answers. They also offer searchers multiple rich results for a single query thrown. The only difference is that they are based on the presumed multiple intentions of a query (resulting in both multiple queries and results) vs. multiple viewpoints resulting from a single query.
These broad queries searchers can find interpretations of what the user is actually asking. Moreover, multifaceted snippets are designed to give searchers extensive and actionable set of results for these multi-intent query scenarios. They are different from Bing’s multi-perspective intelligent answers in that they assume that searcher is asking a different question. Therefore, it provides with responses for each of the queries that it thinks the user may have actually attempted to get answers for.
Google Multifaceted snippets will be made available for mobile users in first, and will be coming to desktop results over time. Stay tuned to know more about the feature as update comes.
Inputs and images: Search Engine Land
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