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Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

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Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#31

Post by stmw »

smt88 wrote: post #10
isoprophlex wrote: post #3

If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable. I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.

I'm glad it's not just me.

Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#32

Post by mkl »

ryanatallah wrote: post #11

"Earth distance to sun" gives the correct answer: https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=e...

Interesting. It says 149.6 million km, which is correct.

[distance earth to sun in km] gives 149.6 trillion km, which is 15.81 light years.

Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#34

Post by bobsil1 »

onion2k wrote: post #25
TomK32 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still cloudy here in Austria, I'll count the number of suns later when the clouds are gone.

I in the UK and I can't believe people still fall for the "sun" hoax. I don't know anyone who's ever seen it.

Lived in Seattle. We had a nice day of summer once.

Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#35

Post by binarycrusader »

smt88 wrote: post #10
isoprophlex wrote: post #3

If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable. I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.

bing seems to get this right in both instant search and otherwise.

Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#36

Post by w4tson »

smt88 wrote: post #10
isoprophlex wrote: post #3

If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable. I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.

That’s just general search. When looking for code issues and snippets it’s worse

Don’t even get me started with github. Half of humanity’s code seems to be in some bucket that doesn’t understand punctuation when you search

Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#37

Post by MiddleEndian »

isoprophlex wrote: post #3

If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

If you look at my post history, at some point I used google to determine the average words spoken per day. I initially trusted Google's answer indicating women speak 2 to 3 times as many words per day on average as men (which is not true).

A quick Google search on my phone for "average number of words spoken per day" gives similar results right now. Although the text starts with an ambitious sounding phrase "previous research" it ends in present tense and has 7000 in bold for men and 20,000 in bold for women.

Re: Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

#40

Post by Cybiote »

As of this posting, if you put a "what" in front of the query, it returns the correct average distance. I suspected the parser, even if it was learned, is sensitive to the query format.

Despite what the press teams of large companies will tell you, our ability to model language is still in its early infancy.

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