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Also the data they are serving is often incorrect or outdated. I've grown accustom to not trusting these info boxes.
by sixothree 7y ago
Also the data they are serving is often incorrect or outdated. I've grown accustom to not trusting these info boxes.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI don't trust them either. They seem to pull info out of random places, and you can't easily tell how up-to-date the content is.
- notahacker 7y agoYep. And what's worse is that sometimes the site is correct and/or up to date and the Google snippet attributed to that site isn't or is poorly chosen for the question. Google "chancellor" from the UK and it'll suggest the question "who is the UK chancellor now" which expands to name the previous chancellor (an error Google attributes to gov.uk which would have been updated in July with the new appointment). Click on the link to Google the question and this time the snippet attributed to the same source will be up to date and give you the correct answer. But if I still need to load a new page to get the right answer I'd preferred to go direct to the source page without it serving me wrong answers wrongly attributed first. And the other questions are also a rabbithole of rubbish to fall down (the question "who was the previous chancellor?" answered by "previous chancellors have opted for whisky..." is my favourite combination) or excerpt the wrong part of the page and then encourage you to search Google again to get the same unhelpful excerpt again rather than deign to look at the source period. Getting this stuff right across millions of queries and unstructured data of mixed quality is undoubtedly an incredibly hard technical problem but I think it's probably better to sometimes let users leave Google properties than feed them inaccurate answers inaccurately attributed...
- baroffoos 7y agoThey also crop the content so even when it is correct you can't see all the steps.