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There is something to be said about how failure cases are handled even for systems that are almost always (say, 99.9%) successful. This is particularly true for

There is something to be said about how failure cases are handled even for systems that are almost always (say, 99.9%) successful. This is particularly true for systems where failure cases cause harm to people. A common example might be assumptions about people's names that are implemented in some form on a government website. Perhaps it is the case that 99.9% of people in this jurisdiction do have a first name and a last name each of which are representable in Unicode with a character count less than 50. But that's still 0.1% of people who now can't get a driver's license, and that's unacceptable. However, in this particular case, I think the very low probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars, combined with the very low probability of any measurable harm being done to those people by Google's response, makes me conclude that this is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would call "broken."

makeitdouble 5y ago
You are bringing a very good point. On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing. For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display. And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query. There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action. Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.

makeitdouble 5y ago

You are bringing a very good point. On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing. For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display. And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query. There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action. Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.