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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

It does work for that. For a large number of searches, on relatively uncontroversial topics, search engines have effectively become oracles of truth.

This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

Obviously I’m aware that not all data is uncontroversial and agreed upon, but it’s a fact that a large percentage of searches are quite literally treating search engines as oracles of truth

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>It does work for that.

It does not. I used the moon thing from last year as an example. Here[1] is a very noncontroversial query that still yields factually incorrect results in the box at the top. Yes if you read the results carefully and think about it you'll realize it's wrong but then you're doing the same thing you would be doing otherwise.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APq-WBv0RNgr6Q3zUOjDc1lM...

And this example https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png that's still broken as it was half a year ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )

> It does not.

In the "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" example that the person gave, it absolutely does work that way in regards to the user's motivations.

When a user googles for "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" They are almost certainly attempting to use a search engine as an oracle of truth.

> that still yields factually incorrect results

Search engines aren't perfect. That does not change the fact that the oracle of truth model, is a good model to describe a user's motivations.

Such as when they google "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday".

helen___keller wrote:

>This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox that says "February 12, 1809" and a "February 12 in history" page. I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result. At most the search engine needs to be smart enough to match "birthday" in the search query against variations of "born on" that are present in the article.

> But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox

I am not saying that there is only a singular way of displaying information.

Instead the point here is that Yes, users who search that are actually trying to use Google as an Oracle of Truth here, and if the top results are anything other than what his actual birthday is, then that is a problem.

So in other words, yes it is being used as an oracle of truth, even if there are different ways of precisely displaying that.

> I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result

Only if the article links is actually the truth, and not some other number. So yes the search engine is being used as an oracle of truth, to find out what the actual answer is to what his actual birthday is.

"The Covid vaccine doesn't prevent deaths 100% of the time. So it does not work."

Something doesn't need to be perfect to work well.

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