Patent: On Adjusting Featured Snippet Answers by Context

Bill Slawski breaks down a newly granted Google patent Context scoring adjustments for answer passages that sheds some light on how Google may use this for processing question queries that want textual answers and how those answers may be decided upon.

It talks about how they feel users of search systems are often searching for an answer to a specific question, rather than a listing of resources.  For example, for the question query [why is the sky blue], an answer explaining light as waves is helpful.

Key points:

• Long query answers can be selected, based partially on context signals indicating answers relevant to a question.
• The context signals may be, in part, query-independent (i.e., scored independently of their relatedness to terms of the query. This may consider context of the document in which the answer text is located.
• Hierarchical headings that may be used to determine the context of answer passages that may be used to adjust answer scores for featured snippets ( heading may include page title, content in HTML heading tags, anchor text for an internal link (jumplinks), etc
• It also talks about how google may see some queries as an implicit question – For example, the query [distance of the earth from the moon] is in the form of an implicit question “What is the distance of the earth from the moon?”
• and much much more