The Outline piece proved that in the search for convenience, Google was getting things wrong. In 2017, The Outline showed that Google often displayed completely wrong information at the top of the results when people searched for things like “Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK?” or “Why are firetrucks red?” The article delved into the so-called “ featured snippets,” those big boxes at the top of search results that are supposed to give users a quick answer to what they’re looking for. Google's search algorithms are why it became so powerful in the first place, but sometimes, however, the algorithm is painfully stupid. Or I could blame myself, for putting my phone number in my stories as a way to get tips from readers who might have something newsworthy to share.īut on this query, Google's algorithm was clearly broken-for some reason, it thought it was a good idea to extract and prominently display a phone number from article hosted on that’s titled “Facebook’s Phone Number Policy Could Push Users to Not Trust Two-Factor Authentication.” Of course, I could blame VICE’s formidable SEO. (Image: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/Motherboard) “The first few web listings … don't actually have a phone number available on site so it seems that Google is mistakenly crawling other content and exposing the phone number in Search Engine Results Pages, thinking that this is applicable to the query and helpful for users.” (Vice Media is a client of Acknowledge Digital.)Ī screenshot of a Google search. “ trying to scrape for a phone number to match the intent of the search query,” Austin Kane, the director for SEO strategy for the New York-based consulting company Acknowledge Digital, told me in an email. The effect is that it seemed like my phone number was Facebook's phone number, because that is how Google has trained people to think.Ĭonsidering that on average, according to Google’s own data, people search for “Facebook phone number” tens of thousands of times every month, I got a lot of calls. As it turns out, if you Googled “Facebook phone number” on your phone earlier this week, you would see my cellphone as the fourth result, and Google has created a "card" that pulled my number out of the article and displayed it directly on the search page in a box. Initially, I thought this was some coordinated trolling campaign.
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