A patent update published this week tells us how Google can evaluate the results for a snippet .
When a search engine ranks search results in response to a search query, it may use a combination of query-dependent and query-independent ranking signals to determine those rankings.
A query-dependent signal might depend on a term in a query and how relevant a search result may be to that search term. A query-independent signal would depend on something other than the terms in a query, such as the quality and quantity of links pointing to a result.
Answers to questions in search queries can be ranked based on a combination of query-dependent and query-independent signals that could determine the rating of a particular snippet answer score. An updated patent on textual answer passages sheds light on how these can be combined to generate featured snippet answer scores for selection from the answers to questions that appear in search queries.
A year and a half ago, I wrote about answers to featured bahamas phone number data snippets in the post Does Google Use Schema to Write Answer Passages for Featured Snippets? The patent in question was the Candidate answer passages patent , originally filed on August 12, 2015, and confirmed as a continuation patent on January 15, 2019.
This patent was a continuation patent to an original patent on answer passages, in that Google would search for text answers to questions that contained nearby structured data with related facts. This could be something like a data table or possibly even schema markup. This meant that Google could provide a text-based answer to a question and include many related facts for that answer.
Another continuation version of the first version of the patent was published very recently. It provides more information and a different approach to ranking responses for featured excerpts, and it is worth comparing the criteria in these two versions of the patent.