Google sucks now
by Rob - November 29th, 2024.Filed under: Uncategorized.
Google is dangerous since it’s started serving up AI answers instead of actual links to reliable sources as the first thing you see after a search.
I put in “major Canadian cities,” and it replied:
What are the ten largest cities in Canada? The top ten largest cities in Canada are: Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Mississauga, North York, Winnipeg, Scarborough, and Vancouver.
That’s flat-out wrong. Neither North York nor Scarborough have been cities since 1998 — twenty-six years now; more than a quarter of a century. They were consolidated into Toronto back then.
The correct answer (via The Canadian Encyclopedia) is, in descending order of population: Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Mississauga, Vancouver, Brampton, Hamilton. That is, Google had two things that don’t even exist in its list of the top ten, and it missed both Brampton and Hamilton.
And, although Google didn’t explicitly state that it was ordering them by size, it was clearly trying to do that — but got it wrong. According to the latest Canadian census figures, Winnipeg should come before Mississauga, not after.
Sheesh.
November 29th, 2024 at 8:48 pm
Appalling, right?
Using DuckDuckGo here…
December 2nd, 2024 at 1:46 pm
I went to Microsoft to research things and still have my VPN if I want to use it. Google is giving nothing but trash today. They went from the #1 search engine to the worst is less than a year.
AI is not ready for doing searches. And when I asked for a how to fight with a sword, it refused to give it to me.
YUCK. When you are writing, you want the results you need, not some machine response.
And don’t get me started on analysis by AI. Of a story. There will be things that are either hilarious or so wrong its sad. I did it to see if it was reliable–it isn’t. AI misses all the nuances of writing and co-piolot, not matter what level you have sucks.
December 31st, 2024 at 4:05 pm
I play this old computer military game called Jagged Alliance 2. Over the years some very smart people have modded the original game, adding new territory, new characters, new weapons and such. Within the mod I am currently playing is a rare kind of ammunition called AET ammo, which you can’t buy and can only find on dead enemy soldiers.
The thing is, in real life I know nothing about guns and the different types of ammunition available to use. I wasn’t sure if AET ammunition is a real thing or a product of the imagination of one of the modders. So I Googled it, “Is AET ammunition real?”
The new Google AI told me, “Yes, Accelerated Energy Transfer (AET) ammunition is real. AET rounds are a type of specialty slug-thrower ammunition designed to be used in space stations and aboard spacecraft.”
What!!? Aboard Space Stations…? What Space Stations? Astronauts have guns on the ISS…?
I kept searching and found this quote on a Wiki website for a different computer game called BattleTech, “Accelerated Energy Transfer ammunition are specialty slug-thrower rounds commonly used only by ComStar’s Explorer Corps. Like Frangible Ammo, AET rounds are designed to be used aboard spacecraft and space stations by reducing the risk of overpenetration and ricochets.”
So the Google AI believes AET ammunition is real because the computer scraped it from a computer game website and it can’t tell the difference between real and fantasy. And the worst thing is, if the Google AI believes such nonsense, how do we find a real actual factual answer? How can I trust anything Google tells me now?
January 30th, 2025 at 10:21 am
Yup, that AI nonsense is very annoying. It will never match human writing, since it can’t actually experience, feel or research. It just regurgitates a mixture of what is already on the internet.