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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a UI problem. Google ought to re-state the question they're answering, which may be slightly or entirely different from what was asked.

In other words, if I Google "What year did Tom Hanks land on the moon", the answer box should say "US astronauts landed on the moon in 1970" (not just "1970"). Give users the ability to assess whether the AI was correct.

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Why would it say that? US astronauts landed on the moon in 1969 (Apollo 11). Tom Hanks starred in the movie Apollo 13, and the real life mission of Apollo 13 happened in 1970.

Whoops! If you can't tell, I didn't actually look up the years! Thanks for the correction.

What is a bit funny is that US astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, 1971, and 1972 but not 1970.

I don’t think it’s a UI problem. You are presuming the system knows the question it is answering.

Yeah, it's not answering questions, it's giving the best answers which they could find themselves. It doesn't means it's the actual answer, nor that it's to the actual question, that's up to you to confirm.

Google isn't an encyclopedia, it's a search engine. It search inside content and try to find the best content that fit your criteria, it could be from trustworthy source, or not, it could be right or wrong on what you meant. For sure their goal is to give you the closest thing to what you asked, with the best sources, but it's not a guarantee, so it shouldn't be trusted as such.

It's crazy that we all came from the "don't trust Wikipedia" and now some people are arguing that we should be able to trust Google results directly.

This is so wrong in so many ways. Google shouldn't restate anything I type in (this is my opinion, but it's based on solid ethics and a decent understanding of good software engineering practices).

Also, everything about Google's "answer" is wrong, from the date, to the people, to the singleton response to a question that should have multiple answers.

Let's all move to DuckDuckGo and Yandex.

Why would the factoid "US astronauts landed on the moon in 1970" be anything more then pattern matching on the input?

I don't think I understand your question? Yes, I'd say the system presumably works via some form of pattern matching.

There is no need for a question to answer, just a match.

Oh, I see where you're coming from! Well, if that's the case, that strikes me as something Google needs to fix. It should be pattern matching both the answer and the likely question!

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