Google is terrible at providing accurate answers

A few examples of google giving completely false answers to very basic questions have been floating around for a while. Some of these, like "how many legs does a horse have?" and "how many legs does a snake have?" have been fixed (with what appear to be manual interventions from google).

Still, a huge number of these inaccurate answers keep coming up, so I thought I'd catalog a few. I'd be interested to see ones that other people find.

Populations of various objects in the solar system:






Anatomy:










Space exploration:








I have a few more, but they are in a similar vein. Would be curious to see if anyone has found some for completely different topics.

I do suppose this has to do with Google reinterpreting my queries, so that is answering the question it thinks I want to ask rather than the one I actually asked. This has become a real annoyance in search over the last year... about half the time, Google returns results for a search that isn't the one I actually made, and I have to try again with various combinations of quotes around words to get google to perform the search I want.

Best eye-opener about the socio-political landscape of America, as an outsider, when you google "American Inventors"...

Imho it will be interesting how (and if) Google will try to fix consistency issues between different languages. Due to the difference in content available Googles answers are completely different in various languages. For Google Germany Neil Armstrong was the first person on Mars I don't know what Google did or if I just ignored these "complex" queries previously but I feel like Google has made a few step backwards for these snippets in the last few month. Might be only a bias due to recent increased media coverage though.

8 heads, but 9 lives!
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issorc said:

Imho it will be interesting how (and if) Google will try to fix consistency issues between different languages. Due to the difference in content available Googles answers are completely different in various languages. For Google Germany Neil Armstrong was the first person on Mars I don't know what Google did or if I just ignored these "complex" queries previously but I feel like Google has made a few step backwards for these snippets in the last few month. Might be only a bias due to recent increased media coverage though.

Click to expand...

Machine learning is the answer, once the model is trained properly it'll get really good.

That's because they keep citing crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia. As one of Wikipedia's main contributors, and have found it ridiculously easy to post hoaxes on the site and fool Google. Hence the value of the site for SEO and online reputation management.