@rodhilton It also looks like none of the results that Google displays provides the answer. The ones that look like they might are scam sites.

It does provide the answer under the "People also ask" section, but since those are hardly relevant to me the majority of the time, I tend to ignore that section.

@rodhilton Not that this contradicts the main point (that Google Search is over, which I agree with) but this same query in Google for me provides the correct result. Incredibly low bar but it does come back correct.

@rodhilton This is the snippet that I get, but the first link below that, and the "people also ask" section is the wildly incorrect AI-generated one.

@rodhilton uh... Wtf!
But well, it's always been (and what the majority maybe never learned in the first) that Google ain't a fact finding machine, same as (academic) Wikipedia often is years behind actualities

@rodhilton The Age of Google Search is over

That last line reminded me of #LOTR so I made this heh heh:

@rodhilton
works for me...
but probably because I use the "german" google

@rodhilton I see lots of replies that report it was fixed, but I got the bogus result just now. Incredible.

@rodhilton Might want to check the alt text on these images

@rodhilton And we're, well, someone, is worried about AI becoming SUPER INTELLIGENT? 👀

@rodhilton they appear to have fixed it now, but absolutely agree it’s no longer as relatively great as it used to be.

@rodhilton
If you ask it ChatGPT the answer is perfect
@zandbelt

@rodhilton AI: spreading misinformation faster

@rodhilton tbf you searched with a lower case “k”

@rodhilton Idk, but it feels like duckduckgo shows better results than google. Surly Google shows more info but most of them useless. While ddgo shows legitimate results.

@rodhilton I just tested it. Amazing.

@rodhilton

Which is why I am using #DuckDuckGo to track down a replacement gasket for my dryer door. No thank you Google, I do not want to purchase a new dryer.

@rodhilton ????

@rodhilton I tried it and got similar bad results from Google. That bogus Emergent Mind result was the second link listed, not the first one. The 5th resultwas a reddit post from 2021 claiming there are no countries in Africa that start with K.

DuckDuckGo returned a different list of countries (https://www.countries-ofthe-world.com/countries-of-africa.html) as the first link.

@rodhilton I've just tried it myself and I am actually speechless.🤐

ChatGPT: "Being speechless is actually a symptom of..."

@rodhilton Amazingly, the bogus result is STILL at the top of #Google's results page. #AI

@rodhilton Argh! My students will inevitably use the first result that pops up on Google because they assume it's authoritative. I guess I'll be teaching them all to use an alternate search engine this year...

@rodhilton The first step after installing a browser is making sure you pick a search engine that’s not an advertising platform masquerading as a search engine.

@rodhilton Often times DuckDuckGo's search results leave a lot to be desired, at least from my own experience. That's why I switched back.

@rodhilton

I get the correct result, but the 3rd link down is the wrong result. So it's partially fixed.

@rodhilton

I had to do it. This is what I got...

"While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this."

WTF?!?

@rodhilton wtf

@rodhilton jesus hercules christ it’s still doing it on my end

@rodhilton I wonder why I get a different result?

Maybe Google "fixed" it? Or maybe I'm not opted into AI search results?

Is this a thing Google is trialing?

@rodhilton same for me wtf is going on?!?

@rodhilton “benefits”

@rodhilton Google search has been going downhill for some time. It thinks Medicare and Medicaid are the same program, likely because there is a federal agency called the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and so it sees the two names connected very often.

For some reason Google also believes that "hyper" and "hypo" are synonyms.

It has been a long time since I have been able to use Google for anything work-related. It's quicker and easier to email a colleague for a link.

@rodhilton @accretionist Oooh!

Did you know that, while “Kenya” starts with the ‘K’ sound, it’s actually spelled with the letter ‘K’?

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/did-you-know-that-there-is-no-country-in-africa-that#:~:text=While%20there%20are%2054%20recognized,with%20a%20%22K%22%20sound.

#TheDressIsWhiteAndGold

@rodhilton Companies are so busy racing each other to include "AI" in their products that they haven't noticed it doesn't actually work.

Search engines are now life-critical infrastructure. "Move fast and break things" is grossly irresponsible.

@rodhilton had to try it, hoping maybe it's a regional thing or got fixed, but no. Absolutely amazing.

Edit: even bing manages to bring up an alphabetical list of African countries.

@rodhilton *nodds in agreement*

As much as one can criticize #duckDuckGo for a lot of their search results being bad [don't use them for anything re: #trans #healthcare cuz they'll vomit up #transmisogynist #hate #propaganda] they at least know how to make their #InstantAnswers work and spit out the correct result to something from #StackOverflow / #ServerFault 97,5% of the time...

@rodhilton

If that can help the issue predates ChatGPT, and by quite a lot. Just a couple of examples I have myself confirmed:

-- Google top blurb used to cite @malwaretech as the creator of NotPetya

- Google top blurb used to cite half-life of Cs-137 at 6 days, not 30 years (while linking to the correct wikipedia page)

- Google list of greatest scientists used to include Didier Raoult, becuase they once in early 2020 Macron referred to him as such and reputable sources reported about it

@rodhilton i get a different result, but equally shitty: 'While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound.'

@rodhilton
I had heard about this issue. I didn't realize it was based on a Deez Nuts joke.

@rodhilton This is funnier than it should be

@rodhilton
Google is now useless as a search engine. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

@rodhilton I just tried it and.. wow. Yep. I haven’t used Google for search in years and I’m feeling very smug about that at the moment 😅

@rodhilton @Mojeek also manages to outperform Google here 🔥

@rodhilton I just tried this now and got the same wrong results by Google. Wow. Here is my screen capture:

@rodhilton gronk

@rodhilton It's not chatGPT - it's the first site with article about African's country starts with K

@rodhilton
Yup

@rodhilton@mastodon.social all search engines are garbage.

@rodhilton I now get this. Google does recognise Kenya again. Phew!

But read the description of Kenya. Then look at a map if you need to. This is not great.

@rodhilton

Been using DDG for over a year now. No regrets whatsoever

@rodhilton Kagi works great for this

@rodhilton starting to thank the odds of human labor being replaced by machines in the short term is overstated.

@rodhilton those fake questions in Google Search are incredibly annoying. I keep opening them when I use Google and they never contain the actual answer to the question. Usually if you click open the site there's a completely different question.

But for me Google Search already died when they started randomly moving the Images tab around.

@rodhilton I tested #Ecosia (which gives the same results like #Bing) and these are the same like #DuckDuckGo. I hope Bing doesn't start to follow #Google with these types of ideas.

@rodhilton

Startpage.com works also and find the List of African countries

@rodhilton can confirm this: just tried in a couple private browsers:

@rodhilton i could not believe this so I had to test it. Yes, Google is broken.

@rodhilton They've fixed it at some point.

@rodhilton We should be careful about the extent to which we rely on technology.

@rodhilton @tante funnily, doing the same google search in german gives a decent answer. Appears different languages are silos in llm (wasnt obvious to me untili typed this)

@rodhilton @JamesGleick I had been reporting bad search results w screenshots to Google using their Feedback mechanism, but I stopped after my fifth report when I realized that the feedback wasn’t going anywhere. Just moved on to DDG

@rodhilton for completion :D https://search.brave.com/search?q=countries++in+africa+starting+with+the+letter+k different AI, different source, same shit :D

@rodhilton Bing also responds correctly.

I’m actually kinda glad that the "King" (Google) fails here.

Womp womp

@rodhilton

This is actually hilarious 🤣🤣

@rodhilton 🤔

@rodhilton kenya suck deez nuts is funny what can I say

@rodhilton alternate timeline in which all humanity lives in kenya because google never fixed this and it was the only country the AIs couldn't figure out how to find in the google maps api.

@rodhilton Feels strange defending the old Googy, but... Google Search was never meant to be the source of truth. It is what it is: a search. If you create a text file somewhere on your computer with "2x2=5" in it, and then do a search for "2x2", there is a good chance the top result would say "5".

Of course, they still feel pressured to correct this result (and they did), but maybe it would be better if they didn't. Providing somewhat accurate information is Wikipedia's job.

@rodhilton I wonder if we will return to paper book catalogues one day because of this. Libraries are still curated by humans. 🤔

@rodhilton I get this as the first result if I remove the quotes, and I wouldn't search with the quotes by default for that kind of query:

**Kenya** is located on the eastern coast of Africa and borders Somalia to the northeast

@rodhilton Yay - this is what you get when you chase dollars instead of sense.

@rodhilton chatGPT4 like this… People (and obviously Google) should REALLY stop using chatGPT 3.5 it’s utter crap compared to 4

@rodhilton When I am signed in, I get only partly more accurate answers than when I am not. Even more cynical.

@rodhilton I have used DuckDuckGo for years but used to follow up with a further !g search on Google maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of the time. Lately not so much as the result on Google are often worse. Quite a few times this week Google even stated there are no results whilst DDG returns lots.

@rodhilton This led me down a rabbit hole of how to block crap sites from Google search results and discovering uBlacklist. It works with multiple search engines, including DDG if you need to fine-tune things to avoid junk sites. You can even have subscription lists for maintained blocklists so you're not doing it all on your own.

https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

@rodhilton Try asking ChatGPT how heavy a black hole is.

It will claim that it's infinity heavy or has infinite mass.

Then asks how stuff can rotate around it, if the mass is infinite, as everything would just be pulled in with infinite gravitational pull.

Then it will be confused and claim it's not infinite, but just very large.

The ask something related to the weight of the black hole and it will claim again that their mass is infinite.

It ingested *way* too much bullshit in this regard.

@rodhilton Things are even worse than this suggests. Lots of the changes to Google's SERP hints that more and more queries will be answered without any context/sources, so your detective work - regarding how it got things wrong in this case - will not be possible.

@rodhilton

What I love about it is that it says that Kenya doesn't start with a letter K. It is spelled with a K sound.

@rodhilton seems to have been fixed when I google that I get a list of countries that start with the letter k

@rodhilton I would not recommend selling your Google stock based on this post.

@rodhilton At this rate chat GPT couldnt even win a beauty pageant

@rodhilton I asked my own OpenAI API #GPT 3.5 and got the right answer.

#ai

@rodhilton Google would probably fall for Ligma

@rodhilton
I have now switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo.

@rodhilton Kenya is in East Africa, not Africa, you silly dumdum

@rodhilton Absolutely love this! Now that it has been roasted in the limelight a while, Google can release a state-of-the-art edge-case hack for this particular problem.

@rodhilton
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1838/

@rodhilton 有了 AI 之后，这种垃圾内容农场只会越来越多，搜索引擎应该识别并且屏蔽掉才行

@rodhilton okay, hear me out: Ecosia gives you "Alphabetical list of African countries - ThoughtCo"

@rodhilton it's like no one stopped to ask what you get out when you put garbage in.

@rodhilton Love ChatGPT... NOT...

@rodhilton both Google and ChatGPT are slowly falling apart

@rodhilton Why I've been using duckduckgo unless I want crap results with google ads and worse for a few years. Started because of the search bubble, though thankfully I avoided their app.

@rodhilton @ncweaver Of *course* there’s a Deez Nuts joke in this mess somewhere.

Another early #ChatGPT session of mine was astronomy-themed and eventually I asked it to tell me more about the Pleiades cluster, the Hyades cluster, and … the Bophades cluster.

At first, it wrote back whether I meant the Boötes cluster (a real thing), but I told it no, I wanted to know about Bophades.

It walked right up to the point where I could deliver the punchline, but I decided against it.

@rodhilton now do Santorum

@rodhilton 🙄

@rodhilton Decided to test some other AIs:

- Brave Search fails horribly and says there aren't any and then mentions Kenya
- Llama 2 (running locally, offline) provides detailed and accurate information

Though Llama 2 still hallucinates sometimes and should not be trusted. DuckDuckGo had an AI feature called DuckAssist that was pretty good, but it was removed.