Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
-
DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
-
Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
I get the same as the main post. Either way the point still stands. I had someone correct me with a misconception about something because he googled it and thats what it said in the answer box. It’s getting increasingly difficult to rely on search results especially when google synthesizes them into questions and answers with little context
Yes. I have to keep reminding my parents that those little Google answer boxes aren’t real search results and can’t be trusted. They sometimes say the exact opposite of the page they’re citing!
What point?
Oh, honey. You must be new here. Googling something, taking the first answer that fits your needs, doing zero follow up, and posting it confidently is nothing new. That has been happening for the last few decades.
In what way? Like always, I have had to do a little critical thinking to gain anything out of my google searches. But now, sometimes the answer is right there. In what world is that a bad thing?
But you might just say “hurry durr it give me answer, therefore correct”. Again, yes, that has always been the case. People will use any tools available to them to support their point. If a new tool has less than a 100% success rate, I don’t see that as a problem.
The point is that google is no longer just listing search results. For years now it has been giving the “correct” answer as well as results. This started of with things it could recognise and easily solve like calculations (“what is 432 times 548”), but has now moved into general queries powered by LLMs that have no knowledge of fact.
Okay? As I said, google has been giving incorrect results for decades. Now, just like before, it gives incorrect answers sometimes. But it has gotten a LOT better at giving those correct answers.