For an example, I searched for “zirp” in DuckDuckGo, and got this among the results:
Where normally an excerpt from the page would be seen with the search term highlighted, I instead get a paraphrased summary written in the style of a clickbait content mill. Because I am pretty sure this has been invented by the search engine and the actual Wikipedia page contains none of this text – I even looked into the raw HTML source code.
This has been happening for a while, and not just for Wikipedia (and not just in English) – here is another example from Microsoft Learn (again, this “excerpt” does not appear on the actual page– something similar is embedded in a <meta name="description"> tag, but differently phrased):
I do, however, notice this particularly often with Wikipedia results, where it seems particularly jarring – I get confused seeing a result I probably would want to look at, summarized in a style so off-putting and reminiscent of SEO spam.
Where does that pseudo-excerpt come from? Was this misfeature announced and explained anywhere? Can I disable it?
