Featured Snippets Results in Google Web Search: An Exploratory Study

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large dataset of Polish Google search results to understand the characteristics and sources of featured snippets, revealing their prevalence, common sources, and linguistic patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for collecting Google search data and provides insights into the origin, format, and linguistic features of featured snippets in Polish search results.

Findings

48% of featured snippets are from the top-ranked result

Featured snippets mainly come from trustworthy sites like Wikipedia

Most snippets are presented as readable paragraphs for voice assistants

Abstract

In this paper authors analyzed 163412 keywords and results with featured snippets collected from localized Polish Google search engine. A method-ology for retrieving data from Google search engine was proposed in terms of obtaining necessary data to study featured snippets. It was observed that almost half of featured snippets (48%) is taken from result on first ranking position. Furthermore, some correlations between prepositions and the most often appearing content words in keywords was discovered. Results show that featured snippets are often taken from trustworthy websites like e.g., Wikipedia and are mainly presented in form of a paragraph. Paragraph can be read by Google Assistant or Home Assistant with voice search. We conclude our findings with discussion and research limitations.