> Ten years ago, maybe. If you did it during the last decade, your search was probably served by a natural language parser which would serve up the answer from

> Ten years ago, maybe. If you did it during the last decade, your search was probably served by a natural language parser which would serve up the answer from a facts database before searching the web. Just checked, and for me it says "Illinois / Capital: Springfield" with big bold betters, and below that are suggestions for picture searches for Illinois, and even further below that is the web search results of which Wikipedia is indeed the first. Yes, and for anything that's more complicated than literally a lookup in a very common table ("list of US state capitals"), it's very common for Google to return Instant Answers that are either nonsensical or literally incorrect. I've had Google tell me that ninjas are Portuguese, that the park is closed today because of rain (it is sunny and the "rain" refers to a day over three years ago), and other stuff which sounds correct, and is presented as correct information, but objectively is not.