I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy. Actually I think that is a seriously editorialized take as well, not in keeping with

I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy. Actually I think that is a seriously editorialized take as well, not in keeping with the spirit of HN. I think it would be more correct to say that much of the time popularity is accuracy, in that it's what the searcher is looking for. When there are a variety of interpretations of a query, the most popular interpretation is the rational prior expectation. When not -- for example, when I search for "go" with a history of searching for programming related topics -- Google tries to give me what I'm looking for. But it's also just a hard problem. That featured snippet about the dentist for example: Google's computers aren't investigative journalists. The purpose of the featured snippet is actually to favor accuracy over popularity by deferring to journalists when Google senses that the searcher is looking for information about an event that was covered in the news. However, if the journalists get it wrong, how is Google going to know? Dollars to donuts, if Google actually knew the right answer, that's what they would surface.