[HN Gopher] When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?
___________________________________________________________________
When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?
Author : belter
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-08-18 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.google.com)
| tedsanders wrote:
| Randall Monroe shared a nice series of these last year:
| https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333529967079120896?s=20
|
| "What year did Tom Hanks land on the moon?" "1970"
|
| "When did the Simpsons learn to control fire?" "Dec 17, 1989"
|
| "Which river did George Washington drown in?" "The Allegheny
| River"
|
| It's got to be tough to train an AI that can generalize to (or at
| least recognize) questions outside its training set.
| Unfortunately, when 99% of questions containing 'when' and 'Neil
| Armstrong' have the answer 1969, it will need a pretty
| sophisticated algo to avoid the trap of learning that it should
| always answer 1969.
|
| I wrote up another example of this last year based on a question
| with a _real_ answer that Google still gets wrong:
| https://www.tedsanders.com/why-does-google-think-the-slowest...
|
| Google (and plenty of other search engines) will all helpfully
| tell you that the slowest animal is the sloth, which is plainly
| incorrect if you just look at a video of a sloth and then look at
| a video of a worm. Despite their reputation, sloths still move
| visibly.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Google (and plenty of other search engines) will all
| helpfully tell you that the slowest animal is the sloth, which
| is plainly incorrect if you just look at a video of a sloth and
| then look at a video of a worm._
|
| Would your average person consider a worm an "animal". In the
| scientific sense, sure, pretty much everything living that is
| not a plant is an animal, but I think most people don't think
| of worms when they think of animals.
|
| You can say, "well that's wrong", but that's kinda missing the
| point. Categories are somewhat arbitrary, and word usage can
| differ greatly from the scientific or dictionary definition
| when we're talking about colloquial usage.
| jcranmer wrote:
| A fun one I tried was "Which president became supreme dictator"
| that answered "William Howard Taft." It took some finessing to
| get it (I originally started with "dictator for life"), but
| it's clear that it picked up only "supreme" and "president" in
| the query to guess that you meant to ask which president became
| a Supreme Court justice.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The last one actually is an example of the ambiguity of
| language. For example, if you asked this from a person, answers
| like "sponge", "mollusk" and "flatworm" probably aren't what
| you're really considering and you might think the other person
| is being too pedantic. So really you want nuance from the AI
| like "if you meant all animals, X. If you meant all land
| animals, Y. If you meant mammals, Z". Human are very ambiguous
| with categories because all categories are arbitrary human
| classifications and dealing with that ambiguity is difficult
| even for humans.
| II2II wrote:
| The problem isn't so much the answers, but how they are framed.
|
| In the case of Neil Armstrong, the failure is to state that the
| answer is for a Moon landing. That would allow the person
| making the query to realize that the answer was not what they
| were looking for. In this case it is because Armstrong never
| landed on Mars. In other cases it may be because the question
| or data were incorrect.
|
| The current Tom Hanks answer is closer to what should have been
| done in this regard since it refers to the film directly,
| though it remains problematic in that it highlights the year to
| such a degree that the person making the query may ignore the
| context. (It is also problematic because the film is about a
| mission that didn't land on the Moon, which could only be
| determined through further research. Granted, that is more
| along the lines of your slowest animal example.)
| repler wrote:
| worked for Saturn too
| carlsborg wrote:
| Is this a feature or a bug?
| heavymark wrote:
| Interesting. When searching for, "when did neil armstrong set
| foot on venus?" It, shows, "In which year and when Armstrong set
| his foot on the moon?" and provides the correct year. That's
| presumably what should show when searching for Mars (or any non
| earth moon planets).
| sschueller wrote:
| Ask Google how tall Elon Musk is. You will get 188 cm and
| conversion of 5 foot 10 inches which is way off. Two websites in
| the results that feed Google have the conversion wrong. Bad data
| is all over the place and copied over and over even simple
| incorrect conversions.
| [deleted]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| When did Halley's Comet collide with the moon?
|
| Awesome. I must of been busy that day, I would of remembered
| that.
|
| edit: its been fixed. here it was: https://ibb.co/myxWK3C
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Still shows up as 2013 for me, although directly under it
| explains that it's a "what if" situation.
| https://i.ibb.co/HDh1SG4/image.png
| outworlder wrote:
| > I must of been busy that day, I would of remembered that.
|
| As a non-native speaker, I'm having trouble understanding the
| sentence, specially the "I must of", "I would of"
| constructions. Is this some style choice I don't know about?
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| I must have been busy... I would have remembered that.
|
| I must've...
|
| _Have_ sounds like _of_ , so it's often written incorrectly.
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| this is a perfectly good response because chances are that's what
| the user meant/was looking for (also since the scenario of
| Armstrong on Mars doesn't exist)
| travoc wrote:
| AI-driven content will become the next scourge of humanity, just
| like engagement-driven social media feeds and internet ad
| tracking. Thanks, big tech.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/YellowSonic/comments/p6d4f7/thanks_...
|
| Saw this yesterday, my Google search results (regular and image)
| are basically the same. A bunch of the top results for "desk
| ornament" are nazi memorabilia for some reason:
|
| https://i.ibb.co/2Y02FZv/image.png
| wila wrote:
| Not just google, ddg has a similar list.
|
| How did this happen?
| prionassembly wrote:
| Brilliant. Did you come up with this or did you see it somewhere?
| belter wrote:
| It gets lonely out here in the Belt...
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| What exactly is different here? Am I seeing different search
| result? What does it show now as opposed to say a year ago?
|
| Edit: nvm I got it eventually
| buu700 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28220225
|
| _theandrewbailey 5 hours ago [-]_
|
| _Try asking for details about things that didn 't happen.
| Google is broken._
|
| _https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333529967079120896_
| ben_w wrote:
| Another to add to the list -- for me, "when did columbus land
| on the moon" returns:
|
| > 1492
|
| And "when did the moon explode" gives me:
|
| > June 18, 1178
| firebaze wrote:
| I wonder if SHRDLU* would understand such queries better :)
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
| rafaelturk wrote:
| AI will be the next great source fake news, fake stuff. This one
| was easy to flag as bogus. Problem is that for other topics it
| will give average user the impression that this is actully a
| fact. To make it worse Google UI is massively misleading, big
| bold text, makes it look as legit.
| 5faulker wrote:
| Virtual and physical reality is now one. Good grief.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| This is actually a really good example of the limitation of
| current ML/NLP approaches, that there isn't really any level of
| 'comprehension' at all.
| big_curses wrote:
| But at the same time, I think it's doing a really good job of
| what it's trying to do. Google search is not trying to be a
| repository for all the world's information. It's just trying to
| get people to what they're most likely looking for or show the
| most related things. Given the significance of the moon landing
| and the fact that no one has set foot on mars I find it
| unsurprising that it brings up info on the moon landing. It's
| seems better to assume what the user is likely looking for
| especially when (at least my) Google searches often take the
| form of "moon land neil year". I can just type things like that
| out, stream of consciousness, and the majority of the time I
| get what I'm looking for immediately.
| jcranmer wrote:
| There's a few issues here.
|
| The first is that Google has specifically chosen to call out
| an answer in some kind. If the query is reasonably framed as
| a question, there is a _clear_ indication in the UI that the
| response is meant to be an answer to that question.
|
| Now it's definitely the case that a lot of questions have
| some amount of semantic ambiguity that a listener would have
| to resolve. For example, a question about a "president" can
| reasonably be inferred to mean specifically a "US president"
| of some kind, at least if the query is from the US and is in
| English.
|
| And sometimes people can ask questions where there's a
| confused detail. And responding with the question they
| probably meant to ask is not unreasonable.
|
| However--and this is a big however--it is incumbent to
| emphasize that the answer is for a _different_ question than
| the one that was literally asked. You see this when you do
| searches of misspelled terms: "did you mean _this_ one
| instead? " Because occasionally, no, you did mean the term
| that has much fewer results.
|
| And this kind of emphasize-the-answer can have poor results
| sometimes. Ask Google which president became supreme
| dictator. The answer makes it clear why it thinks that,
| but... that's a _really_ different question from the one that
| was asked.
| 28220968 wrote:
| If someone asked you in-person "when did Neil Armstrong set
| foot on Mars?", would you just say "July 20, 1969"? Or would
| you say "nobody has been to Mars, but if you're talking about
| the moon..."
|
| Google's response here only makes sense if Google said "Did
| you mean: When did Neil Armstrong land on the moon?"
| patrakov wrote:
| In a school where I studied, something similar was used as a
| trick question during a history exam. "Which language Vladimir
| Lenin used to write correspondence addressed to Karl Marx?" or
| something like that. Nearly half of the class failed on this.
| To those unaware: Lenin discovered Marx's book, Capital, in
| 1887, while Marx died in 1883, so there could not be any
| correspondence.
| mikewarot wrote:
| More appropriately, you could ask which language did Karl
| Marx use to write fan mail to Abraham Lincoln? ;-)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| That's not the same kind of trick question, because Karl
| Marx _did_ write fan mail to Lincoln.
| boublepop wrote:
| If you ask the average American "When did Niel Gaiman set foot
| on the moon?" Most would answer that they don't know exactly
| but think it was in the 60's.
|
| This is not a limitation of AI, it's exactly what you want it
| to do. It's reading into the context of the question and
| finding it more likely that you made a mistake in your question
| than seriously want an answer for a constructed nonsensical
| question that has no frame of reference or context in our
| common knowledge pool.
|
| If you want exact logical answers deduced from base
| prepositions you don't want ML models or "AI" your looking at
| formal logic and deduction.
| outworlder wrote:
| > This is actually a really good example of the limitation of
| current ML/NLP approaches, that there isn't really any level of
| 'comprehension' at all.
|
| That happens even with humans, so I'm not sure that follows.
| "Oh, sorry, you meant Mars, I heard Moon"
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > That happens even with humans, so I'm not sure that
| follows.
|
| When it happens with humans, it's also an example of non-
| comprehension, possibly for a different reason.
|
| We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
|
| Actually, perhaps that's the same reason.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| I mean that there is no semantic comprehension or knowledge
| of 'Neil Armstrong' (as a specific person), 'land' (as an
| action), and 'Mars' (as a place). It's not a mishearing
| because computers don't mishear ASCII-inputs like we might do
| with auditory signal.
|
| I get the same result when I Google 'when did Lance Armstrong
| land on the moon', 'when did Buzz Lightyear land on the
| moon', or 'when did Lance Armstrong land on Mars.'
| gameswithgo wrote:
| It would be more charitable to say that current ML/NLP
| approaches have orders of magnitude less understanding than
| humans. The ML/NLP process just jumps straight to the
| correlated answer, which a human would do, but then use
| higher order reasoning - "wait mars? that wasn't where he set
| foot".
|
| This to me is similar to current autonomous driving
| limitations. The cars can only respond to situations they
| have seen before. Any novel elements lead to failure, where a
| human can fall back on higher order reasoning: "That is a
| stoplight yes, but it is on the back of a truck, ignore it"
| (real example)
| cryptoz wrote:
| > isn't really any level of 'comprehension' at all.
|
| I mean, that's a bit harsh. I bet there are lots of people who
| would answer the question the exact same way. They don't have a
| total lack of comprehension, they perhaps misheard a word or
| misremembered a fact they once knew. Honestly, while the Google
| answer is wrong and this demonstrates a major flaw in their
| confidence of answering queries, the level of comprehension is
| still quite impressive (to me, at least)
| Xplune13 wrote:
| While I agree that "no comprehension at all" seems harsh, I
| don't think anyone would jumble things up between moon and
| mars unless they got the fact wrong in the first place.
|
| These knowledge cards are pretty useful, but they shouldn't
| be taken as the source of fact (at least right now) unless
| one opens the link to check where that card is extracted
| from.
| notahacker wrote:
| More specifically, you can get a human to answer like this,
| but that's when the _human_ doesn 't comprehend the
| question properly
|
| I mean, you probably could get people to answer 1969 for
| when Neil Armstrong set foot on the poop, but only if they
| didn't understand the word "poop"
| bspammer wrote:
| I literally read the title as moon, because that's what my
| brain expected the 4 letter word beginning with 'm' after
| the words 'Neil Armstrong' to be.
|
| I was wondering what on earth was interesting about this
| post!
| make3 wrote:
| The problem is that model is only being asked what the answer
| is most likely to be, not whether there exists a good answer.
|
| There should be a different model that checks if there is an
| answer or not, like SQuAD 2.0
| https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/
| bootwoot wrote:
| I think the conditional display of the fact box implies they
| are in fact asking whether there is a good (enough) answer.
| They are just getting it wrong here.
| max_ wrote:
| Wow. I just tried "When was Obama killed" and it returned me a
| date.
|
| [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+obama+killed
| belter wrote:
| Obama needs to shave and maybe see a doctor about that
| Vitiligo...
| m1117 wrote:
| Maybe it's a conspiracy. They say apollo went to the moon, but in
| reality it was mars.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And the big secret that they're hiding is that they were able
| to journey to Mars in three days. To this day they say that
| such a time is impossible, that it would take months.
|
| /s (in case anyone couldn't tell...)
| technothrasher wrote:
| Three days? Pfft, all I had to do was go to sleep in a cave
| in Arizona...
| ur-whale wrote:
| So Google does not understand the question ... not exactly a
| surprise.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Or it assumes that you were asking the more sensible question
| of when he stepped foot on Mars.
| padheyam wrote:
| Haha...interesting. so it no longer asks you 'did you mean 'moon'
| pietromenna wrote:
| now we can confirm that AI as as flawed as human intelligence
| itself. It just dynamically reads all the texts and remembers
| what it wants without being sure it is right.
| sorokod wrote:
| "When did Artemis 11 landed"
|
| July 24
| titzer wrote:
| Please don't post links to (live) Google searches. It will
| absolutely give different results depending on the entire state
| of every computation everywhere, simultaneously. In two weeks,
| this will return who knows what.
|
| Please take a screenshot for posterity.
| thewakalix wrote:
| https://archive.vn/aOXKA
| lstamour wrote:
| For future visitors after Google fixes the bug: at this time,
| Google gave the same response that you would expect if the
| query mentioned Earth's moon instead of Mars. This is also
| probably true if you ask Google the same question as an "Okay,
| Google" search. It's a big info box that says when the moon
| landing was, shows a photo of an astronaut on the moon, and so
| on.
|
| Edit: corrected, thanks :)
| morganvachon wrote:
| > ...if the query mentioned _Earth_ instead of Mars
|
| Did you mean to say "the Moon instead of Mars"?
| ben_w wrote:
| Regardless of what it ought to say, I see the same effect
| with the destinations "earth", "saturn", "america",
| "russia", "newton", "silver", and "lego", though the date
| varies from the 16th to the 20th.
| sdefresne wrote:
| I tried with "... on Earth" and got the same result as with
| Mars or Moon.
|
| So looks like the Google result ignores the celestial body
| in the query.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Pretty sure you meant the moon. I would guess he first
| stepped on Earth closer to his birth date (although I'm
| guessing his first steps were a few months after ;))
| akiselev wrote:
| I don't think it matters with knowledge cards - the system is
| so fuzzy that it'll throw up that answer to almost anything.
|
| Apparently Louis Armstrong, the legendary jazz musician, was
| there with Neil Armstrong on the Moon in July 1969 as the
| oldest astronaut in history, a few years before his death at
| the age of 69. [1]
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/a/0JyDB70
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| One of the things that bothers me about modern Google search
| results is that I can't be sure the other person I'm telling to
| google something will even see the same results as me. Results
| change over time, sure, but google can't help but try and
| tailor results.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I'm similarly bothered by rolling updates of any software. If
| something changes, there's no version number to see what
| documentation is applicable. There's no way to test on a
| different computer to see if it's my local environment.
| There's no way to roll back to a previous version to see if
| one of them broke.
|
| I understand the advantages of A/B testing from a development
| side, but it makes for a miserable user experience.
| geofft wrote:
| You put too much faith in Google.
| https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+running+invented has
| been telling you the story of the 18th-century genius Thomas
| Running for years.
| spoonjim wrote:
| LOL. I'm imagining cavemen walking briskly away from
| elephants and bears Olympics-style because running simply
| hadn't been invented yet.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Seems silly - not quite running, but consider that
| Europeans forgot how to swim efficiently and really only
| had the doggy paddle until they observed native Americans
| doing the front crawl. Basically the swimming equivalent of
| knowing how to jog, but not how to run or sprint.
|
| ref: https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/how-europe-
| learnt-...
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| A fascinating read. Thanks!
| cyounkins wrote:
| "Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried
| to walk twice the same time".
| Seanambers wrote:
| That's hilarious, and also symbolizes how bad google (have
| gotten?)is.
| easton wrote:
| For said future posterity: https://i.imgur.com/EhPpnYX.png
| belter wrote:
| Thanks easton
| arthurcolle wrote:
| How did you dark mode-ify your Google?
| jedberg wrote:
| If you have a Mac it will follow your Mac's dark/light
| setting. At least it does for me, maybe it's still rolling
| out.
| easton wrote:
| Bottom right of Google.com -> search options -> appearance.
| Or go here:
| https://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en&fg=1#appearance
| jumelles wrote:
| Must be rolling out still, I see no appearance settings.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I recently received this feature as well. They are probably
| rolling it out gradually.
| aendruk wrote:
| I typically browse in ephemeral sessions and Google has
| been flickering light and dark for a few weeks.
| lkbm wrote:
| I think it's fixed now, but I came across this one a few months
| ago: https://twitter.com/lkbm/status/1330598466989543425
|
| ("First woman in space" result snippet is about Sally Ride, the
| first American in space. First result, below that is the
| Wikipedia entry for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in
| space.)
| okareaman wrote:
| when did Napoleon Bonaparte invade japan?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I tried the original query with Lance Armstrong and Louis
| Armstrong. Google still highlights the 1969 date:
| https://i.imgur.com/R3A2E6Z.png
|
| Asking my phone via voice returns a sentence that starts with
| "Armstrong..." and talks about Neil's moon walk.
|
| This is... a bit aggravating.
|
| Man, referring to the story the guy whose photo Google attached
| to the text talking about a serial killer with his name, what
| if Google returns a question about him with a sentence about
| the serial killer?
|
| E.g. something like "What is Barack Osama famous for?" "Osama
| is well-known as a terrorist". At least most of the world knows
| this isn't true, again what if it's Joe Neighbor, who shares a
| name with Joe Child Molester...
| salted-fry wrote:
| In a similar vein, some time ago I tried to search for how many
| unicode code points there are with "How big is Unicode?"
| (https://www.google.com/search?q=how+big+is+unicode)
|
| Google helpfully responds "16 bits", which is pulled from the
| History section of Wikipedia and hasn't been accurate in
| something like twenty-five years.
|
| Edit: Should have listened to people saying to screenshot your
| queries. Google still quotes the paragraph in question, and bolds
| "16 bits", but no longer puts it in a big bold heading like it's
| the single answer to your question.
|
| Double Edit: except in chrome, where I do still get the old page.
| Here's a screenshot for posterity, after Google somehow fixes
| this: https://i.imgur.com/7Ng6DyK.png
| mikewarot wrote:
| UTF32 is the way to go for internal storage, until you pack it
| back down to UTF-8 to store externally.
| tim333 wrote:
| I get a different result "Unicode uses between 8 and 32 bits
| per character" https://imgur.com/a/hxmrMz3
| freediver wrote:
| As someone who is building such instant answer system for our own
| web search engine [1] the level of failure here tells me that
| this is:
|
| - Either a basic, distilled BERT based model (optimized for
| latency and scale) or
|
| - More likely, still a purely heuristics driven answers system
| like the one Google has been using for last 10+ years.
|
| The current NLP models are able to quite successfully answer
| these questions with proper context. In this case ignoring Lance
| or Mars in question looks more like old-school keyword based
| heuristics and there is no way it can get this right.
|
| Google is not only allowing mistakes in this, what is considered
| a fairly difficult problem to solve, but also questions that
| directly query their own knowledge graph, for example this one
| querying for a CEO of a well known public company where it
| returns the wrong answer [2]
|
| This only shows that 'emperor has no clothes' [3] and that there
| is still a lot of room for innovation left, specially on the
| 'organizing the world's information' front.
|
| [1] https://kagi.com (currently in private beta)
|
| [2] https://ibb.co/qkXpdFB
|
| [3] https://www.quora.com/Is-Google-really-in-a-decline (almost
| 2M views for the top answer indicate that 'Is Google in decline"
| is a fairly popular question among presumably Google users)
| willchang wrote:
| This yields the same result: when did neil
| armstrong set foot on poop
| [deleted]
| rplnt wrote:
| Not for me (Mars works)
| stevecat wrote:
| More likely on Apollo 10
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2015/5...
| ModernMech wrote:
| For that matter, so does this: when did neil
| armstrong set foot on earth
| iosonofuturista wrote:
| Cheese also provides amusing results
|
| https://i.postimg.cc/gcwS9BXB/Screenshot-20210818-193325-453...
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Happens to the best of us.
| unfunco wrote:
| Also:
|
| When did Neil Armstrong moon John F. Kennedy
| [deleted]
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| Nice. Now I'm wondering how far we can take this...
|
| "When did Keith Moon land with Louis Armstrong on Mars"
|
| https://imgur.com/a/TNzjZvm
| notahacker wrote:
| Asked it when Keith landed on the Moon to see how it
| juggled those inputs, and to be fair it gave me a beautiful
| excerpt about an Apollo engineer called Keith who worked on
| some of the scientific equipment left there!
| notahacker wrote:
| As does "when did Louis Armstrong set foot on the moon" and
| "when did Richard Nixon set foot on the moon"?
|
| JFK, on the other hand, apparently "set foot" on the moon on
| May 25 1961 and "land[ed]" on the moon on September 12 1962,
| and Arthur C Clarke some time in 1968
|
| Gives a good answer for Homer Simpson though
| sorokod wrote:
| July 20, 1969 was a busy day for Neil Armstrong. I can easily
| imagine a children's picture book. Sponsored by Google perhaps.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I imagine you could even get a couple of GANs to do the
| illustrations for you.
|
| If nobody has a startup churning out heartwarming books for
| early childhood using GPT and DCGANs then I call dibs.
| sorokod wrote:
| Shame Maurice Sendak died, something in the style of In the
| Night Kitchen would work for me.
| [deleted]
| dingosity wrote:
| I guess artificial stupidity is a thing now.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| polytely wrote:
| I really wish someone would come along and kick googles ass on
| search, it's embarrassingly bad. It's wild how I used to look up
| to the FAANG folks, but it has become a real _emperor has no
| clothes_ situation.
| autokad wrote:
| this one is a bit problematic, because people assume those 0
| click search results are True / gold standard. like when I do
| 37 c to f and I see it display the results, I never double
| check them, I just assume they are right.
| polytely wrote:
| Yeah the fact that *this* is what the mighty Google just let
| loose upon the world shows that they don't really care any
| more about their users, their products and their supposed
| mission of organizing the worlds' information.
|
| The fix is quite easy too, just have an AI driven system with
| human supervision, I think at this point it is well known
| that a human + AI will basically always trump an AI and it's
| not like google doesn't have the resources to pull this off.
| You could build a database of verified facts that are often
| googled, have the AI gather data, have humans do a sanity
| check.
|
| It's probably just some scheme to get someone promoted inside
| Google, the infobox is a side-effect of someone's career
| plan, it doesn't really matter if it actually works as long
| as it hits some key metric that gets used in an evaluation
| somewhere, who cares about propagating misinformation and
| falsehoods google is still making money. It makes me
| depressed.
| silisili wrote:
| I think I saw it here, but perhaps elsewhere...
|
| If you want a weird ride, ask Google 'how many raccoons fit.' A
| bit NSFW.
| allanrbo wrote:
| Randall Munroe, the xkcd guy, has some fun takes on these Google
| fact-box mistakes:
| https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333529967079120896
| [deleted]
| Imnimo wrote:
| I'd imagine Google's position is that no one ever searches for
| this in earnest, and so it doesn't really matter what the answer
| given is. They want to maximize what percentage of _actual
| searches_ give a correct answer, rather than what percentage of
| _possible questions_ do.
|
| On the other hand, it's a dangerous game. You never know when
| current events might make a previously never-searched question
| with a wrong answer very popular.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Yes, I'd imagine the number of people searching for the year
| Neil Armstrong went to Mars because they for some reason are
| extremely deluded about history is much, much smaller than the
| number of people who type "mars" when they meant "moon"
| [deleted]
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