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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

I assume you're trying to say that Google's answer is better, right? Google's certainly being more authoritative, but the answer to your question is actually fairly subjective, there's more answers than just "Edam", so IMO surfacing search results is better than just having Google pick one answer.

Google's also been known to produce completely incorrect "authoritative" answers.

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He didn't ask, "What cheese goes best with fruit?" he said "goes well with fruit." So Google's answer is technically more correct. The best kind of correct.

I have an iPhone, sometimes use Siri, and I prefer Google's answer. Simply, if I asked a verbal question, I prefer a verbal response. If I ever ask Siri a question, and I get the "Here's what I found on the web" answer, I consider it a failed operation, and I take a different tack.

If you are speaking to your device for this kind of question, the authoritative answer is what you want. You expect me, after taking to my device, to go over and pick it up and search through web results? If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have asked the question by voice in the first place!

An "authoritative answer" that may not be true, has no context, and may have been put there by SEOs or propagandists, is worse than no answer at all.

The authoratative, wrong answer is what I want? Or, what if I ask, say, which actor is the best in the world? Is there any authoratative sounding answer that is of any value?

I believe you have failed to understand the original point you are replying to.

"Edam" might be authoritative, but it is not correct. The problem isn't simply that the answer is fundamentally subjective, the bigger issue is that there's not enough contextual information in the question to even arrive at an answer that one could consider subjectively correct.

I replied elsewhere, but it's like answering the question "What wine would pair well with dinner?" with "Zinfandel". Without having even a vague idea of what's on the menu, you're just picking a wine at random. Maybe it's correct, maybe it isn't. But being authoritative when there's not enough information to actually speak with authority is not the right answer here.

The agent should then ask for more information; not point me to a web search. In most cases, the authoritative answer is what I'm looking for and the question less likely to be this subjective.

The thing is Siri won't give me an answer either way.

Nobody's arguing that sending you off to search results isn't particularly useful. We're just pointing out that authoritatively answering a nuanced question without enough context isn't any better, it's just differently wrong (and in some cases, strictly worse).

Whether or not Siri or Google Assistant correctly and authoritatively answers more (or more relevant) questions is a completely different topic than what's being discussed here.

For the record, this exact search with Google Assistant did not provide an authoritative answer for me and instead gave a bit of a voice summary and a link for more information. This is still way better than just directing me to the search with no more voice feedback.

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