Information “snippets” that Google features at the top of many search results are sometimes wrong. Google gets the information, which is displayed in a highlighted box, from one of the top several search results, but those results are based in part on how popular they have been on the Internet, not necessarily on how authoritative they are. For example, the boxes often feature information from Wikipedia.com, which is known to contain inaccuracies. What to do: Don’t assume that information featured by Google is always correct…and report information you know to be incorrect through the “Feedback” button located at the bottom right of the snippet box.

Google Search, which handles more than 3.5 billion queries a day, provides the highlighted information boxes with the results of about 15% of all searches. The snippets can be very accurate with historical names and dates and very useful for simple questions such as “When is Mother’s Day?” or “Is it going to rain tomorrow?” For weather, Google Search automatically determines your location and provides the forecast from Weather.com, the website for The Weather Channel.

However, searches that lend themselves to more subjective answers have dragged Google into the wider cultural debate over fake news. For example, in February a history professor at Case Western University complained that his students had wrongly learned from a Google snippet that several US presidents, including Harry Truman, had been members of the Klu Klux Klan. The snippet pulled the information from The Trent Online, a Nigerian Internet newspaper site started in 2013. And a few years ago Google snippets answered the question “What happened to dinosaurs?” with text from a creationist website.

And some Google search results can seem overly self-promoting. A question about directions will highlight an answer from Google Maps…a query about a song provides a snippet from YouTube.com, a Google subsidiary.

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