this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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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?"

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I doubted this, so I tried it. I haven't used google for ages, so I first had to search "google" in DDG, then I went to the main page. When I started typing it in, it suggested the full text of the search, so I thought it was even less likely that it would work like the OP said - that even if it had been the case that it previously did that, so many people have self-evidently done that search that the results would now be correct.

But no - there it was, right at the top - "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."

And with that, I'll contentedly go back to not using google.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound."

Not going to lie, that's pretty disturbing. This search engine is used by millions (maybe billions?) and they're providing false information to all those people. That's scary.

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

You can use "!g yourinput", there are a lot of useful ones like !w for wiki

If you use DDG you should try it, you can save a lot of time: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

If you're using Firefox you can set these custom aliases up directly, @w and so on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

AI-Powered AI News"

lol