For the past few days or so, folks on social media are going a bit nuts about how Google doesn't know how many legs a horse or snake have. If you try to Google it, Google will tell you horses have six legs and snakes have four legs - this is no joke.
Try it by searching for [how many legs does a horse have] and you will get:
Try [how many legs does a snake have]:
Danny Sullivan from Google said Google got it wrong and the team is looking how they can mess up on something so obvious. He wrote on Twitter "We're aware of that. It's also a pretty weird case. It's a search that's not often done because people largely already know how many legs a horse has. And there's not a lot of authoritative content on the topic because who's writing about something well known like this...."
Here are his tweets, although he probably responded to over a dozen complaints about this on Twitter:
As for what will happen, when we encounter things like this, we look to understand why what got selected gave a false positive & work to improve so an entire range of queries gets better. Here's more on how that applies to featured snippets: https://t.co/S7Es573vRm
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 29, 2019
At least Google knows how many legs spiders and humans have, for now, until someone on the internet makes Google look like a fool?
It is really not that uncommon to find queries with featured snippets where Google simply gets it wrong. We could literally point out examples like this on a daily basis. But it is a lot better than what it was when featured snippets first launched.
How did this happen? Probably from a piece of content on Wikipedia that Google trusts too much. But hey.
Interesting point made by @PolarBearby on this yesterday that this may have occurred as a result of 'fore' converted to 'four' (2 x 'fore' legs and four legs = 6 legs) in misspelling module. In response to Claudia Hauff sharing -> https://t.co/vCtyOzi1jh
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) April 30, 2019
No, they got it from a Wikipedia page that uses the topic as an example in what not to do. https://t.co/Lc5YpFUtxi
— SEO-Theory.Com (@seo_theory) April 30, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.
