Google continues to struggle with the technical challenge of providing ‘one box’ answers as the search giant recommends a good price telescope for £1,600,000,000.
This search result came to light over the last few days from a user trying to research how much a decent telescope would cost him. This search triggered one of Google’s ‘knowledge graph’ answers informing him that $2.5 billion dollars was the kind of budget he should be looking at.
Google has been rapidly expanding its ‘instant answers’ over the last few years by scraping (copying) information from websites and directly showing what it believes is the user wanted to them.
Webmasters and site owners claim this practise is damaging to them, depriving them of users, revenue and therefore the means to create this content in the first place. Google claims their approach is ‘user-centric’ and they have no obligation to make sure websites stay in business.
Whichever side of the fence you fall on, it’s clear Google needs to improve its technology in this area before something really embarrassing happens, like say, recommending anal massage to cure hiccups.
