Google search is over

JoBo@feddit.uk to Technology@lemmy.world – 1240 points – Rod Hilton (@rodhilton@mastodon.social)
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Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social

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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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.

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.

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

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