Since early this year, Google began showing really long form answers, or as Google calls them, “Quick Answers,” directly at the top of the search results.
This is a huge debate between Google and the webmaster community. Google rationalizes scraping content and publishing all or most of it as their answer in the search results, saying they are just a swiss army knife but if you want the exact tool, you should click through. While there is fear of the knowledge graph to the point of 55% are scared how far Google has taken it.
Last night, I did one of my first searches that nailed it in for me. Here it is on my iPhone:
don’t worry, she is fine according to Doctor Google
Where are the search results? More importantly, I didn’t have to click through, in fact, I really did click through but only because I felt bad. Why shouldn’t the source get some traffic for giving Google the answer?
I have had friends and colleagues complain to me about this for a while but this is the first time I personally walked into this myself.
