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> Bard wrote that the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. In fact, the first pictures of these "exoplanets" were taken

> Bard wrote that the telescope took the very first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. In fact, the first pictures of these "exoplanets" were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, according to NASA records. Sure, it's inaccurate, but it isn't worse than Google's current "featured snippets" that are so often bullshit and get meme'd. Searching right now for "who took the first photograph of an exoplanet" gives back "NASA's James Webb Space Telescope", with a reference article about the first exoplanet photograph _by_ JWST instead of the first one ever.

xattt 4y ago
They’re re-writing history to cover their tracks! /s
ramraj07 4y ago
The difference in outrage is the same difference in outrage you get between a car crashing in cruise control and a car crashing in autopilot.
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
I just did that search on startpage.com and the second result was "NASA's Webb Takes Its First-Ever Direct Image of Distant World" at https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-first-ever-direct-image-of-distant-world/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-... To be fair, that's a delicate syntactic distinction to be made between "X did Y for the first time" and "X did Y for its first time". The first result was also from NASA and should be a correct result (judging by its headline).
anigbrowl 4y ago
it isn't worse than Google's current "featured snippets" Another way to put this is that it's just as bad as the pain point it claims to solve. And though your basic point makes sense, Google's apparent indifference to quality undermining their own product launch is a huge PR disaster, much like Zuckerberg's performative excitement over Legs! in the Metaverse just highlighted how threadbare the concept was. It shows a company that became huge by being ahead of the curve is now way behind it. Younger HN users may not appreciate the degree to which Google was the massively disruptive New Thing of its day. Prior to its appearance in the search market, incumbent competitors all looked sort of the same, giving you a listing of semi-curated search results in a reasonable time, with different vendors having different advantages and disadvantages. Then one day, there was talk of this new thing called 'Google', what a crazy name. And it was just a search box with two buttons - 'Search' and 'I'm feeling lucky' - is this some sort of a joke website? Where are the categories? Where are the sidebars? You'd better not be wasting my time...then you'd try searching for a topic you were familiar with, and the results were an order of magnitude better than what you had become used to. It was like magic. I still remember the room and the desk where I first tried it and was amazed. And for over 10 years, they could just do no wrong - every product they rolled out was just massively superior and often so new as to have been previously unimaginable. Google Maps was astounding, and Google Street view even more so - in fact I'm still astounded by it every time I stop to think about it. That's why having egg on their face with the Bard launch is so embarrassing. It's not just flawed, it shows a complete lack of imagination and suffers from exactly the same faults that increasingly plague its search product. Imagine if Exxon announced a new clean fuel technology and it turned out to be oil in barrels with a happy face logo.
- pixelfarmer 4y ago
  In the later 90ies I usually relied on HotBot, which actually had better results than Google provided initially. Biggest issue, not just with HotBot, was the completely overloaded start page, which especially on modems made it slow to load. This very simple start page by Google was very intentional; for example right now it is almost 300kB, cookies and other such junk not included, i.e. based on completely different assumptions of the commonly available bandwidth (300kB start page would have been instant death spell for a search page back then). They worked hard to make the crawling + results better, and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for all the other options.

xattt 4y ago

They’re re-writing history to cover their tracks! /s

ramraj07 4y ago

The difference in outrage is the same difference in outrage you get between a car crashing in cruise control and a car crashing in autopilot.

DemocracyFTW2 4y ago

I just did that search on startpage.com and the second result was "NASA's Webb Takes Its First-Ever Direct Image of Distant World" at https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-first-ever-direct-image-of-distant-world/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/09/01/nasas-webb-takes-its-... To be fair, that's a delicate syntactic distinction to be made between "X did Y for the first time" and "X did Y for its first time". The first result was also from NASA and should be a correct result (judging by its headline).

anigbrowl 4y ago

it isn't worse than Google's current "featured snippets" Another way to put this is that it's just as bad as the pain point it claims to solve. And though your basic point makes sense, Google's apparent indifference to quality undermining their own product launch is a huge PR disaster, much like Zuckerberg's performative excitement over Legs! in the Metaverse just highlighted how threadbare the concept was. It shows a company that became huge by being ahead of the curve is now way behind it. Younger HN users may not appreciate the degree to which Google was the massively disruptive New Thing of its day. Prior to its appearance in the search market, incumbent competitors all looked sort of the same, giving you a listing of semi-curated search results in a reasonable time, with different vendors having different advantages and disadvantages. Then one day, there was talk of this new thing called 'Google', what a crazy name. And it was just a search box with two buttons - 'Search' and 'I'm feeling lucky' - is this some sort of a joke website? Where are the categories? Where are the sidebars? You'd better not be wasting my time...then you'd try searching for a topic you were familiar with, and the results were an order of magnitude better than what you had become used to. It was like magic. I still remember the room and the desk where I first tried it and was amazed. And for over 10 years, they could just do no wrong - every product they rolled out was just massively superior and often so new as to have been previously unimaginable. Google Maps was astounding, and Google Street view even more so - in fact I'm still astounded by it every time I stop to think about it. That's why having egg on their face with the Bard launch is so embarrassing. It's not just flawed, it shows a complete lack of imagination and suffers from exactly the same faults that increasingly plague its search product. Imagine if Exxon announced a new clean fuel technology and it turned out to be oil in barrels with a happy face logo.

pixelfarmer 4y ago
In the later 90ies I usually relied on HotBot, which actually had better results than Google provided initially. Biggest issue, not just with HotBot, was the completely overloaded start page, which especially on modems made it slow to load. This very simple start page by Google was very intentional; for example right now it is almost 300kB, cookies and other such junk not included, i.e. based on completely different assumptions of the commonly available bandwidth (300kB start page would have been instant death spell for a search page back then). They worked hard to make the crawling + results better, and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for all the other options.