Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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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?”
when will people learn that search results change all the time and are different for different people
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!
It doesn’t matter? If you search for something and you get a blatantly wrong answer parroted from an AI text completion service, it’s still a fail.
I got the wrong answer from Google just now and I’ve never heard of that joke before. So clearly it isn’t just OP with polluted metrics.
What’s your point here? Is googling supposed to be a lottery of good and shit results?
I just tried it and got this result. The sentence is incredible, I can’t get over how painfully stupid it is.
Apparently Kenya starts with a k sound and a letter that resembles k but not the letter k
I get the result you got, but the Emergent Mind response is the second organic result. That’s still way too high.
Take out “the letter” part and search as just: “countries in africa that start with k”. For some reason it seems the search involving the words “the letter” got fixed but others did not. Confirmed I was able to get both results by doing that and as of this typing I still able to switch between the two results by just adding or removing those words
Interestingly enough, when I removed the word “letter” I got none. If I put it back I get Kenya.
This was done on the same device and same browser session.
While true, I also got the same result as OP.
I did it just now and got this:
So what? They’re usually correct is the point.
Kiribati Kirghizia Kenya
also Kroatia Kuba Kyprus Kanada Kosta Rica Karelia
Yeah, drawing conclusions from a single bad search result is stupid.