When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?

I understand the advantages of A/B testing from a development side, but it makes for a miserable user experience.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=when+did+google+shutdown%3F&...

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)

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.'

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.

The way it used to work you had one intelligent entity forming a query and a machine performing said query. Somewhere along the line Google got this idea returning no result was a bad outcome and started overriding queries. Its like you go to the hardware store and ask for nails, but shopkeeper starts telling you all about nail saloons in the vicinity because they ran out of finishing nails - or worse, goes nail saloon -> spa -> finishing -> ending -> happy ending.

We went from intelligent entity forming a query and a machine performing said query to idiot computer treating you line an idiot.

I think this is an important point. Humans and Google have a similar bias (for different reasons) that they want to be helpful or seem knowledgeable when asked a question, so won't say "I am confused by that question" and will rather give an answer to a question which is similar to a question that they can understand, in the hopes that it is approximately right.

In the case of asking when Neil Armstrong landed on Mars, guessing "I think it was in the 60's" is accurate to within 10 years but off by 56 million km. For a good example of what average people think about the solar system, though, consider the question "Is the moon really a planet?" that was once part of an impromptu debate on TV:

https://www.cnet.com/news/qvc-stars-confused-about-whether-t...

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.

Google's response here only makes sense if Google said "Did you mean: When did Neil Armstrong land on the moon?"

> 1492

And “when did the moon explode” gives me:

> June 18, 1178

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.

I must've...

Have sounds like of, so it's often written incorrectly.