a while back, www.xkcd.com creator Randall Munroe made a pretty entertaining thread on bad website showcasing some truly wild answers Google provides at the top of the results page
now, i know that sending you to Twitter in april 2023 is like sending someone to Pompeii WHILE the volcano experiments an eruption, but better to get what you're getting BEFORE it's all ash, no? that said, for archival purposes, here's an example of an answer google gave ol' Randy boy:
QUESTION: Which president discovered electricity?
ANSWER: Benjamin Franklin.
wow! that's wrong in truly SO MANY ways!
now, a lot of the questions randall posed were purposefully leading, as a showcase more than anything as to what's going on with google's Answer Box algorithm, but the electrics one seems like a fairly benign question. at least for like, a fifth grader learning about history. sadly,
the first result google puts in that box is so often wildly incorrect and should not be trusted
now is the part where i show you the science behind my claim here, except google really doesn't like to discuss the algorithms they use
two reasons, eh? let's click through to the nearly decade-old information google thinks is the best answer to my question and see what wasn't "featured" in their "snippet"
lol. lmao.
like, i could sit here and criticize this ten-year-old article's author for seeing the writing on the wall and buying a paint roller, but obviously here in the future, it's pretty undebatable that google is a monopoly. that said, my first instinct here was to claim google was being self-servicing with this result, which, they were.
but i honestly doubt it's on purpose, because:
i think it's far more likely Google is just pouring all the data scraped from search result sites into a "special algorithm", some kind of black box that reads the user's input and tries to come up with a correct-sounding response with context clues
it just kind of, confidently spouts off a completely incorrect or improperly contextualized answer without considering the dangers of it. actually, it kinda reminds me of another type of tech hell...
imagine if an "AI" chatbot could only speak in direct quotation.
that's essentially the answer box. it's the I'm Feeling Lucky button automated, so you never have to leave google before answering your question. (unless you're the kind of person that cares about citing your sources)
though, luck has very little to do with it, according to SEO experts trying to sell you a solution to navigating Google's monopoly over search. businesses are fighting to get THEIR information and name higher on the results page than what is actually most relevant to your search
competition in a race for capital, with disinformation considered an acceptable casualty. thankfully, google has a solution:
what an absolutely absurd thing to just say without thinking about it! good grief!
THE SOLUTION TO THE SPREAD OF MISINFORMATION IS NOT TO "RELY" ON THOSE BEING MISINFORMED TO MODERATE MISINFORMATION. HOW WOULD THEY KNOW?
the answer box is terrible. click through, cite your sources, and break up google.
even google agrees, see?
