New ways we're helping you find high-quality information

People turn to Google every day for information in the moments that matter most. Sometimes that’s to look for the best recipe for dinner, other times it’s to check the facts about a claim they heard about from a friend.No matter what you’re searching for, we aim to connect you with high-quality information, and help you understand and evaluate that information. We have deeply invested in both information quality and information literacy on Google Search and News, and today we have a few new developments about this important work.Our latest quality improvements to featured snippetsWe design our ranking systems to surface relevant information from the most reliable sources available – sources that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. We train our systems to identify and prioritize these signals of reliability. And we’re constantly refining these systems — we make thousands of improvements every year to help people get high-quality information quickly.Today we’re announcing one such improvement: a significant innovation to improve the quality of featured snippets. Featured snippets are the descriptive box at the top of the page that prominently highlights a piece of information from a result and the source, in response to your query. They’re helpful both for people searching on Google, and for web publishers, as featured snippets drive traffic to sites.By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact. Our systems can check snippet callouts (the word or words called out above the featured snippet in a larger font) against other high-quality sources on the web, to see if there’s a general consensus for that callout, even if sources use different words or concepts to describe the same thing. We've found that this consensus-based technique has meaningfully improved the quality and helpfulness of featured snippet callouts.