Anyone else noticing "Related Topics" featured snippet? Is this new?

[Ria_]

First time I've seen this type of featured snippet and now have seen it twice in the space of a couple hours.

Queries on Google UK desktop:

• surgical instruments
• Hawking radiation

Is this new? It definitely is for the "surgical instruments" search.

Google are highlighting related topics/keywords in bold beneath the usual featured snippet.

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[EGOL]

Thanks for sharing.   I've seen this a couple times too.

I am disappointed that the related topics links deliver the searcher to another SERP.   Google is pulling quotes from wikipeidia, physics.about.com and other websites, yet instead of sending you to the source of this information, they send you to another SERP and another whack of ads.

This matches one of my definitions of spam.  Google isn't answering the original query and is tossing diversions between the snippet and the information that the searcher expected to find. If they were really interested in serving the visitor the wikipedia and about links would be bold and blue instead of a light microfont.

[Ria_]

Sending the searcher to another ad-ridden SERP doesn't surprise me. Google is the ultimate ad-pushing scraper site.

The Related Topics featured snippet seems to be quite similar to the People Also Ask feature that usually appears below the featured snippet separately.

I've seen no mention of them on getSTAT's Featured Snippet whitepaper either, and that was quite thorough SERP research. How new are Related Topics? Or am I being silly, and they've been around for a while?

[Guest]

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