Multifaceted Featured Snippets Now in SERP’s

It seems that most of our blog posts lately have been about Google, and there is a reason for that. Google has been rolling out so many new features and has been announcing new features coming this year. We can’t help but focus on the tech giant.

In this blog post, we want to make you more familiar with Google’s new search engine feature,  Multifaceted Featured Snippets. What Multifaceted Featured Snippets does is allow for queries that are sufficiently broad enough that may have one more interpretation of what was submitted. What this means is that when your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is returned, it will include more than one features snippet, with the original question rewritten as the questions the algorithm assumes the user may have intended. The results will be displayed in the multifaceted snippet that will now reflect the new questions.

Google states that there are several types of questions where showing more comprehensive results can be helpful. They want to start with “multi-intent” questions, which are considered questions that have several potential intentions or purposes. For example, “too pain after a filing” could be interpreted as “why does my tooth hurt still after a filling?” or “how long should a tooth hurt after a filling?”.

What is the Difference Between Multifaceted Featured Snippets and Multi-Perspective Answers?

Bing recently introduced an AI-powered multi-perspective answers as part of its “Intelligent Search”, which includes intelligent answers, conversational search, and intelligent image search. Search results will include two or more authorities sources on a topic and include different answers or approaches to your questions. Basically, Bing uses its deep recurrent neural network models to determine authoritative sources. It then unearths the various viewpoints about a topic and gives the most relevant set of answers.

Google’s multifaceted featured snippets may not seem too different from Bing’s multi-perspective answers, because they both provide multiple relevant results for each question. The real difference between the two is that Google presumes there are multiple intentions for each question which as a result assumes there are multiple questions and results, as opposed to having several viewpoints of a single question. When you ask a broad question, there can be many interpretations of what the user is actually asking.

Google is taking a proactive approach to their search results by assuming that a different question might be being asked altogether and giving out a result that the user may have indirectly wanted.

Multifaceted featured snippet will first appear on mobile and soon after will appear on desktop results. Google has also planned to expand multafected featured snippets throughout 20187 which will include other nuanced questions types that are beyond those that may have multiple intentions. As Google stated, a question like “is it worth fixing my foundation?” has a lot of elements in it that may be important such as duration, cost, or financing.

Remember, Marwick Marketing can help you with all of your SEO and Digital Marketing needs. When people perform a Google search, your business should be right at the top of their search. Let us make that happen!