For trivia buffs, Google now has 'fun facts' about living things
Search fun facts about plants, animals, fruits, and vegetables.
If you're looking for trivia about animals, plants, fruits, or vegetables, you can now just type 'fun facts' after the thing you're interested in and Google will offer a summary from the web.
Google launched the new feature on Wednesday, which positions fun facts about living things in a box above its regular search results on mobile and the desktop. So if you've got questions about fruit, insects, pets, spiders, snakes -- anything from aphids to zucchinis -- Google will highlight several facts about them in that box.
The answers are displayed in Google's featured snippet block, which contains answers to questions that have been programmatically selected from third-party web pages.
Google doesn't explain why it launched this feature now, but it should make it simpler and faster to do a quick search from a phone at the dinner table when a question about any living thing crops up. While it could steer people to factual sources of knowledge about parts of the world, it would also keep people searching on mobile.
"Starting today on Google Search, you can find fun facts about living creatures from around the world, making you the most interesting person at the dinner party or the reigning champ at trivia," says Satyajeet Salgar, a product manager at Google.
Salgar notes that some queries have multiple facts and in these instances it presents one of them randomly. Hitting refresh will deliver a new set of facts in the featured snippet.