Google Answers - List Of Niches With The Timeline?

[guggi2000]

With the evolution of the semantic web, Google becomes an answer engine and gives answers to queries before displaying the SERP.

We had a lot of reference pages that lost traffic in this way. Does anyone know a list when and where Google added "answers" in specific niches?

For example:
"Weather in New York" shows the weather forecast directly on Google since 2012 (roughly) while the results for the equal Spanish query "Tiempo en Nueva York" was introduced just a year later.

Another example is in Sport results and schedules:
NFL results were introduced before UEFA-Champions-League and "Ski World Cup" results are still not being shown.

A full list could help webmasters in analyzing external factors.

[goodroi]

Some people have tried to create lists of Google changes but to be honest all of the lists have problems. That is because Google is making too many changes. The serps layout is always being tested and changed. The knowledge graph keeps growing. The serps are in constant flux. They keep adding new filters and penalties like Panda, Penguin, Pigeon and the other 500 changes they make every year. Even with the Google answers the keywords that trigger them can change.

You think you lost traffic due to Google's answers but to be honest it could have been Google simply triggering different aspects of the universal serps. Maybe they added some news headlines or videos and that pushed you down in the serps. There are many reasons and combinations of reasons which can cause the traffic drop.

Regardless if Google is showing answers in your industry or not, it would be wise to see the big picture. You want to develop a website that provides something of value that Google can't easily replace with information already in the public domain.