this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
1259 points (94.1% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
17 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
1259
Google search is over (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Via @[email protected]

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?"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Google gave me a list of countries as the top hit. Bing did the same. Whoever wrote this article has an agenda.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I just tried it and I got the same result as the guy OP linked to. Google cited this website as the source:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/did-you-know-that-there-is-no-country-in-africa-that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I was able to duplicate the OP results just now. People not getting the promised results are probably on different Google instances.

IMG

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have seen both, on my phone I get the same chatgpt transcript that the toot gets

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's toot. With screenshots. And everyone surely knows by now that your search results are dependent on your search history. And, of course, LLM output is stochastic, not deterministic. It lies at random.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's probably not due to that. The effect of search history tends to be overstated and blamed for any inconsistency. They're not making the search pageload wait on a live chatgpt call, the card is driven by contents of the linked website.

Differences usually are either intentional A/B Testing or artifacts of Google's global architecture. You hit Google twice you're talking to different servers potentially with different versions of software. Companies take advantage of that to see how user behavior compares between versions as a form of testing. Additionally, if you and someone in a different continent hit Google, you're not even using the same data center. Different databases/caches in those data centers will have different data at any one time but they'll eventually become consistent. That causes results to change both person to person and over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Take agenda at deez nuts