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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Please don't post links to (live) Google searches. It will absolutely give different results depending on the entire state of every computation everywhere, simultaneously. In two weeks, this will return who knows what.

Please take a screenshot for posterity.

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One of the things that bothers me about modern Google search results is that I can't be sure the other person I'm telling to google something will even see the same results as me. Results change over time, sure, but google can't help but try and tailor results.

I'm similarly bothered by rolling updates of any software. If something changes, there's no version number to see what documentation is applicable. There's no way to test on a different computer to see if it's my local environment. There's no way to roll back to a previous version to see if one of them broke.

I understand the advantages of A/B testing from a development side, but it makes for a miserable user experience.

Not even different person, Even if you search a query multiple times in a row it changes results drastically. I got a phished website of my Govt's tax website as a top result due to this[1].

W.r.t OP, I've been contemplating a search engine wall of shame[2] for a while now for recording poor search results and perhaps provide actionable feedback to the search engines.

[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/14097614168657469...

[2] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...

Ha, my wall of shame would be thousands of entries all from the same formula:

Google [github issue] [gitmemory page for same issue scraped from github] (add inurl:github)

It's insane. I can only assume Google is actively downplaying GitHub/MS. Still yields better results than bing though, go figure.

Oh right, I always wondered how GitHub/SO scrappers make it to the top results, I thought plagiarism was SEO Don'ts 101? Maybe Google has some whitelist for programming websites due to parsing difficulties and meta nature of it.

Anyways you are welcomed to submit your entries to the above search engine wall of shame thread(It's a validation platform I created), May be someone would see the value in it and create a subreddit or separate website for tracking search queries.

I don't think it matters with knowledge cards - the system is so fuzzy that it'll throw up that answer to almost anything.

Apparently Louis Armstrong, the legendary jazz musician, was there with Neil Armstrong on the Moon in July 1969 as the oldest astronaut in history, a few years before his death at the age of 69. [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/0JyDB70

[0] when did google shutdown?

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=when+did+google+shutdown%3F&...

For future visitors after Google fixes the bug: at this time, Google gave the same response that you would expect if the query mentioned Earth’s moon instead of Mars. This is also probably true if you ask Google the same question as an “Okay, Google” search. It’s a big info box that says when the moon landing was, shows a photo of an astronaut on the moon, and so on.

Edit: corrected, thanks :)

> ...if the query mentioned Earth instead of Mars

Did you mean to say "the Moon instead of Mars"?

I tried with "... on Earth" and got the same result as with Mars or Moon.

So looks like the Google result ignores the celestial body in the query.

Regardless of what it ought to say, I see the same effect with the destinations “earth”, “saturn”, “america”, “russia”, “newton”, “silver”, and “lego”, though the date varies from the 16th to the 20th.

Pretty sure you meant the moon. I would guess he first stepped on Earth closer to his birth date (although I'm guessing his first steps were a few months after ;))

For said future posterity: https://i.imgur.com/EhPpnYX.png

Thanks easton

How did you dark mode-ify your Google?

Bottom right of Google.com -> search options -> appearance. Or go here: https://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en&fg=1#appearance

Must be rolling out still, I see no appearance settings.

This works for me:

"Google Search Page" -> Setting (icon, upper right) -> "Dark Theme: Off/On" (Last Entry in the drop down menu)

I recently received this feature as well. They are probably rolling it out gradually.

I typically browse in ephemeral sessions and Google has been flickering light and dark for a few weeks.

If you have a Mac it will follow your Mac's dark/light setting. At least it does for me, maybe it's still rolling out.

I use Dark Reader extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...

Works pretty well for 99% of sites.

I'm not necessarily asking you, but I'm taking your message as an opportunity to ask if anyone knows of an extension that does the opposite?

I have pretty bad astigmatism, and I cannot read pages with dark background. There used to be an extension I used for this purpose, but it stopped working several years ago, and I have suffered ever since. Going into developer mode to play around with the stylesheet works, but is a huge hassle.

Despite its name, that same extension does exactly that, I believe.

Actually, it has a switcher that lets you choose to darken or enlighten the webpages you read.

Honestly, I never understood why they had that option, but now I get it.

You put too much faith in Google. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+running+invented has been telling you the story of the 18th-century genius Thomas Running for years.

LOL. I'm imagining cavemen walking briskly away from elephants and bears Olympics-style because running simply hadn't been invented yet.

Seems silly - not quite running, but consider that Europeans forgot how to swim efficiently and really only had the doggy paddle until they observed native Americans doing the front crawl. Basically the swimming equivalent of knowing how to jog, but not how to run or sprint.

ref: https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/how-europe-learnt-...

A fascinating read. Thanks!

The linked article doesn't say anything about native Americans, and in terms of substantive data it seems to jump in history from the 4th century prevalence of Roman bathhouses, to 16th century local bans on swimming, filling in the gaps (which account for the entire premise of the article) with speculation about bridges and mermaids.

It immediately follows the description of those swimming bans with other 16th century examples of Tudor scholars endorsing and writing guides on swimming, resulting in an article that's an interesting read but with a poorly supported thesis.

“Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time”.

That's hilarious, and also symbolizes how bad google (have gotten?)is.

https://archive.vn/aOXKA

Screenshot for posterity: https://imgur.com/a/Jn0ARXq

It will return this page.

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