Improving the Google Snippet for "Do fish feel pain?"

In order for people to think that hurting fish is unethical it is important for them to know that fish feel pain. 

A significant source of information for people is Google and their current snippet answer to "Do fish feel pain" is counterproductive to the aim of convincing people that fish do feel pain.



Google Snippet for the question "Do fish feel pain?" (2018-12-12)



How can we improve Google's snippet answer to the question do fish feel pain?

Option 1) Create and popularize useful and authoritative content that answers the question "do fish feel pain" more effectively. While this can be difficult to do, the process of doing so is fairly simple, and is a much more robust and effective method for handling counterproductive search results.


Option 2) Submit feedback to google. Under the snippet select "Feedback"
Feedback to Google on the snippet answer to "Do fish feel pain"

The feedback I submitted was 
You are answering a different question. The question was "do fish feel pain", not "do fish feel pain the way humans do". There is a more appropriate answer a bit down in the results from SmithsonianMag.com that quotes a biologist, Dr. Braithwaite stating "Fish do feel pain. It's likely different from what humans feel, but it is still a kind of pain". I marked this as harmful because people thinking an animal does not feel pain will inevitably lead to more cruelty against that animal. Thank you for your time.

Understanding why Google displays certain snippets
Which snippets are displayed is a result of a fairly complex algorithm that comes down to how useful/popular/authoritative Google has found the answer and the corresponding page it is sourced from. The most robust solution to this problem is to elevate a different website/answer in Google's rankings. How to do this can be a difficult, but the mechanism is very simple, we just need to create better content and make it more popular. There are many ways we could accomplish.

Wikipedia and Google Snippets
It is fairly common for the Wikipedia article on a certain topic to be the source of a snippet so I also made a change to the Wikipedia page for Pain in fish.


A related note
This topic relates to the strategy of improving the responses to google questions in order to facilitate a reduction in animal suffering by providing individuals with information that makes behaviors that hurt less animals easier. Improving the results to long-tail search queries can make eating vegan more convenient. It seems very possible that by answering a million google queries in a helpful way, you could save a billion animals. You can check out more thoughts on that at Vegan Long-Tail Search.

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