Microsoft's Bing search engine claims Australia doesn't exist

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 498 points –
Microsoft's Bing search engine claims Australia doesn't exist
techspot.com
109

You fools! If you die in Australia, you die in real life!

You cant die in australia because you cant be in australia. You would fall off the world. Duh.

Um, Australia is required to exist to stop the weight of the US from flipping the Earth plane over. It's literally the counterweight continent.

I’ll never forget the fall of Australia during the Emu Wars. The siege of Sydney was truly terrible.

They were dropping bears. It was horrible.

Emus? I think you mean cassowaries…

The cassowaries were being controlled by the platypus, who were in turn controlled by huntsman spiders. Drop bears fit in there somewhere......

Emu war was on the other side of the country.

The First Emu War was. Emu War II was much more devastating.

Source: Bing

Thought that was New Zealand, since thats only on maps 50% of the time

New Zealand is technically part of Australia anyway (when you have something we want to claim).

Oof. I think if nz heard you they will haka your ass ;)

They're well aware. Famous Australians like Russell Crowe and Phar Lap would back up this claim.

What the hell is a phar lap. Like you run a lap but far?

Google isn't even sure so at least Bing is providing an answer, not that the wrong answer is great

At least Ecosia delivers

Imagine using ecosia in 2023. You're being scammed my friend haha

What kinda scam do you mean. I'm using it since 2017 or so and never heard of it.

(Please don't recommend me DuckDuckGo - I'd rather use Startpage or Qwant for personal reasons)

Fuck, who's turn was it to pay off bing this month?!

whose

This isn't time for semantics, we've gotta problem here!

Australian users of Bluesky and Mastodon

Now that's what I like to see!

Search engines don't make claims. They just deliver search results. People who fail to understand the difference have a really hard time interpreting the results.

I wish search engines "just delivered search results". Unfortunately, they now directly and confidently answer questions with complete nonsense.

The vast majority of those answers are still just citing another source, though. The only exceptions I can think of are things like math and unit conversions.

My point is mostly that people insist on treating search engines (and now LLMs) as oracles of truth, and they did that even back when all you got was a list of links with small excerpts. It annoys me to no end when people fail so thoroughly at such a basic test of media literacy and then immediately try to place the blame on someone else.

Where the info comes from doesn't exactly change that it's a problem.

You can talk about media literacy, but why even have the thing exist if it can't provide correct answers. That's its only reason for existing.

You seem to be one of the very people I'm complaining about. The point of a search engine absolutely is not to spoon feed you correct answers. It's to find information on the internet that's relevant to a topic. There's lots of wrong information on the internet and it's not a search engine's job to decide for you what's right and what's wrong.

Nobody is saying otherwise. The problem being discussed here is that search engines present themselves as "deciding what's right and wrong" and present themselves as "spoon feeding correct answers". If we really want to improve media literacy, we can begin by advocating for our search tools to not misrepresent the presentation of their data.

Yeah, but it's changing. Search Engines today don't just present you links to other websites, but have also started to take some of that information and show it to you directly. First it was by showing you little excerpts, but now with Bing Chat it's becoming a lot more developed.

With Bing Chat, you ask your search engine a question, and it will answer you directly in a conversation-like manner. This feels a lot more like it's not just showing you a list of sources, but it's answering you directly, making claims, stating "facts" etc. You can easily forget it's just a search engine, can't fault people for this.

does anyone actually ever use Bing, when not either tricked/manipulated into using it or under some sort of bribe/incentive via ms rewards ?...

I got super tired of google a few months ago. "Ah, you searched for these terms. But I am going to ignore that and instead show you results for these diffetent ones, because fu."

So I started using bing instead, I wouldn't say it is worse. Just differently bad. Some search things are much worse, some are much better.

Quite annoying how they keep pushing for "AI" all the time though, so might go back to google soon anyway.

Everybody who uses DDG is mostly using Bing. Albeit more privately.

Huh. I had no idea! And I use DDG... But I feel like all search engines are shit these days. 50% of the hits are autogenerated translations with AI creating false .[country] domain (I'm in Denmark) which are just advertisements. I miss the old days of search engines. Fuck, even Alta Vista gave more right answers back in the Netscape days!

I use it for free access to gpt-4 and dalle-3. Can’t say I use it as a browser though.

Just so you know - it's nowhere near as good as the "real" gpt-4. Maybe try paying for a month and see how it compares.

I will admit that I used it for years for the rewards, and it worked well for me. Once I started using a VPN though, it decided I could only redeem my rewards in Canada (I live in the US). I could have probably fixed it, but it caused me to have one of those "what am I doing anyway" moments and switch to using a SearXNG instance instead.

Bing is so much better than anything else for image search in my experience. Anything else, lol.

you can search anonynous in bing, that's why Ecosia and DDG use it backend

Yep, Bing is pretty solid as far as search engines go.

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Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz are Dead FTW!

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...Guess I'm from Queensland, New York now.

Welcome to the states, friend! You picked one hell of a time to join

It doesn’t exist. Source: I’m here.

Where?

I’m not sure. It doesn’t exist. Perhaps I’m sleeping.

It may have existed at some time, but was probably towed out of of the environment after the front fell off

That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point

This feels just like that situation when gøøgl€ was saying there are no countries beginning with "K" before listening Kenya, except on a continental scale.

#AustraliaIsntReal

Wake up sheeple, time to get with the program. It's finally all coming out...

Flat Earth and other loonies will be all over this as an "accidental leak"

Whats the one that "ackshually" doesn't exist? Its like some running gag or something

I mean have you heard an Australian accent? It's like "this is totally a legit accent, we're speaking English, mate, jabbamawong!" half of it isn't even words they just make it up as they go like they're not being sarcastic.

Never bought it.

It would've been better if they just kept it... I mean, the theory has everybody already

Who caaaaaares, why is this news 😭? It's been said over and over that these networks aren't reliable and can make mistakes, so what, it will be fixed in a month or so? Is not like these systems are deployed in critical situations or anything

It's been said over and over that these networks aren't reliable

What networks? What are you on about, did you even read the article?