Knowledge Panel: Appropriate or a Bug?

[Elio]

Hello all!
I am not sure how to classify this: I was doing a search for “spaghetteria + aosta” (in Italy “spaghetteria” is the place to eat spaghetti and “aosta” is the location) and on the right I saw the knowledge panel for a specific business. I thought that probably that business was really well known in that area and it would make sense for Google to display that knowledge panel.

I did another test with another city (Rome) and I got the same result (of course with a different business in the knowledge panel).

I did a third test using the city I live in (Genova) and I got a knowledge panel of a place outside town, with no site, the business is not verified, there are no reviews, and there are no business info whatsoever in the panel. That got me thinking: could this be a bug of some sort? What do you guys think?

Thank you

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Elio and thanks for sharing.

It sounds similar to the "one box" problem that we had a few years ago. Google appeared to be confused and think that if you searched for a generic term like "San Diego plumber" your intent was to find a specific business by that name. (Or usually very close.)

Were the company names that popped up all very close to or exact matches for the search query?

 

[Elio]

Hi Linda,
thank you for your answer.
As a matter of fact yes (kind of).

They all have in the name the keyword "Spaghetteria" followed by their name" (i.e "Spaghetteria Garibaldi" or "Antica Spaghetteria Francesco e Maria"..basically always something along those lines).

Does this mean that I could coun this as some sort of bug?
Thanks again!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Not sure if it's exactly the same thing as I described. Then it was usually closer to an exact match to the query with both keyword and city in the name.

So for example a search for San Diego Plumber might only pull up San Diego Plumbing & Heating.

At any rate, I don't know if I would call it a bug exactly, in the case above. The algo was still trying to deliver the best answer, just got confused and thought you were looking for a specific business instead of a generic City + Keyword type of search.

But in your case again it might be something else. Could be a bug of some kind I guess.

 

[Elio]

Hello Linda,
thanks again for your clarification. I'll keep this in mind
Thanks!

 

[JoyHawkins]

Did you notice this changed recently? Had you searched this in the past and seen a typical 3-pack?

 

[Elio]

Hey Joy,
this is something I came across just last week, but I don’t know if the results were different in the past or these queries had always shown these results. As soon as I found out about this, I just wanted to get a better idea of what might have been going on there.