Have you noticed that when you phrase a Google query as a direct question, you’ll sometimes see full-on questions in the results, asked and answered by regular old users like you? After June of this year, you won’t see them anymore. According to an updated Google support page, the “Questions & Answers on Google” feature will be removed from Search on June 30th.
The announcement of the change isn’t exactly rocking the foundations of Google’s userbase. In fact, depending on where you live and exactly how you phrase your questions to Google, you may never have seen the section appear before. (It looks like the header image.) According to a few search engine blogs, it seems like the feature has primarily been visible to users in India for the last two years.
It seems that #Google added the new option for the Q&A SERP feature: now it’s possible to ask your question filling the form right in #SERP 🤔
Has anyone seen this before?@rustybrick @sejournal @sengineland @TheSEMPost❓ pic.twitter.com/uywHX3NYMJ— Semrush (@semrush) April 25, 2019
Doing a little hands-on research for this article, I was able to make the Q&A on Google section appear for “how to swap a SIM card” when I manually set my location to India in the Chrome developer tools menu. Running the same search from my Texas, US-based default location, I wasn’t presented with that interface.
The Q&A on Google section isn’t the same as the somewhat automatic answers Google will display based on cached search data, like the answers in Knowledge Graph. And it isn’t the same as the Questions & answers feature tied to specific locations in Maps, which is also answered by individual Google users ( and which sometimes appears in the general Search interface). It isn’t the same as the “People also ask” section, either, which just returns Google results for similar queries.
Even if the interface has been geographically limited in terms of who can access it, the sheer reach of Google means that hundreds of thousands of answers have been collected, possibly more. As it often does when closing products or features, Google is giving users an opportunity to save the data they’ve submitted via Google Takeout, in the Search section. You’ll need to save your contributions by June 30th, 2021.
