"If you are wondering how Mark found this, he did an excellent presentation on that late last year - so check that out. Mark's theory, as he wrote, "I can't find any direct mention of this in Google patents or docs, however my guess would be it is likely a score estimating how far a query (especially a question) sits on the 'fringe' of Google's known entity/knowledge space and how atypical or long‑tail it is.""
"The hypothesis that "question_fringe_score" only pertains to the long-tail nature of a query is incomplete. According to the documentation, "fringe" is a system within the Safety category, not just a measure of a query's statistical rarity Query Classification: In the ClassifierPornQueryMultiLabelClassifierOutput module, the fringe label appears alongside other safety classifiers such as porn, violence, offensive, spoof, and vulgar. This places "fringe" within the context of quality and potential harm assessment."
Google Search calculates a question_fringe_score during query processing and exposes it in internal data fields labeled question_fringe_score. The field surfaced through exploit-based analysis and bug-bounty reporting. One interpretation is that the score estimates how far a question sits on the fringe of Google's known entity or knowledge space and how atypical or long-tail the query is. Documentation indicates that 'fringe' is part of a Safety system alongside classifiers like porn, violence, offensive, spoof, and vulgar, and that the system evaluates documents for being about fringe topics, not only query rarity.
Read at Search Engine Roundtable
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