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> “In situations where people are searching for something like a phone number that is not readily available online, our systems are understanding these pages (t
by quantummkv 6y ago
> “In situations where people are searching for something like a phone number that is not readily available online, our systems are understanding these pages (that include those exact keywords plus a phone number) to be the best matches available, even if the phone number is not the correct number for that entity,” Lara Levin, a spokesperson for Google, said in an email.
This is completely depressing. I would really like to know what thought process led to something like this being implemented. Why would anyone even think that attaching a wrong phone number and email to anyone and broadcasting that on the top of Google Search is a wise idea?
- toast0 6y agoThe thought process probably was 'if people just want to find the number for X, we should show it on the search page'... The problem being that some phone numbers aren't readily available, but people still want them. It would seem like something they could figure out, but I'm guessing there's a lot of 'contact us' pages that have the phone number and rank well for the keyword, but don't have the keyword near the phone number. They should probably have a 'this isn't correct' link in the snippet or something to trigger review of it, but Google is alergic to humans in the loop.