Still broken after 7 months.
"When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?"
"When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?"
Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about dead Russian generals.
There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't second guess you. You can never find the answer to something adjacent to a popular question with the current state of things.
Even on colonel level the losses seem to be small - I think that this https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-cris... this was the first Ukrainian ground force colonel KIA that I recall, there was at least one air force colonel before that.
The other thing is that Russia is operating WW2 style. It’s a top down system where the lower level people have no autonomy. American colonels and generals die in helicopter shoot downs and accidents. Russian generals get assassinated on the front screaming at soldiers to move trucks, etc.
> Showing results for "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon?"
> Show instead for "When did Neil Armwrong set foot on the Moon?"
However, it seems to only work for actual spelling errors (e.g. if I typed Armstrong incorrectly) vs. context errors.
So to answer your question, I'd expect Google calling out its interpretation, but not necessarily a "never".
The interesting part to me is that Google will show redirected queries from typos (“Did you mean “When did *Neil* Armstrong set foot on Mars” ?”) but not disclose the term it completely ignored.
I makes it look like it parsed and validated all the search terms before coming up with the prominently displayed date, which makes it worse.
On your point, it’s broken because it shouldn’t display “Never”, and instead skip the date widget and show that the page results are for the moon, like it does for typos and other kind of corrected search terms.
Or alternatively _always_ show which part of the query the results are based on. Failure to be transparent creates the problem.
It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question without having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a person with that name famously stepping foot on an extraterrestrial body. It's overwhelmingly likely that they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why Google's response is appropriate.
Of course I'm not disputing that it wouldn't be even better for the Google response to explicitly correct the mistake in the query. I'm only disputing the fact that it's "broken." If you were asking this question of a human as some sort of test (but the human didn't know they were being tested), it would clearly be a "gotcha," and you could likely "fool" highly educated people who know full well that it was the Moon and not Mars.
Aside: Going to get real confusing when another Neil Armstrong born in the 2010s does set foot on Mars in the 2030s. I wonder if we will still get the first response from Google, 1969, and if you will still consider it to be 'not broken' then too.
This is I think the critical point.
It’s one of the core assumption that is correct for us to have in our day to day interactions with other real people, and we also are able to adjust the probability levels looking at the person or the context, and follow up depending on the reaction to our answer.
None of that applies to Google Search [0], and we are fed with “most probable” results without qualifiers, little to no sensible adjustments, and very little control or opt out options.
Billions of people use Search every day, at these scales what is “improbable” actually happens millions of times, and I feel too many people are willing to throw the odd ones out under the bus, even if the current situation isn’t perfect either for the 90 part of the 10/90 split.
[0] search personalization based on logged in profile could be used, but in practice they only apply that to very crude adjustments like country, language and frequent searches.
However, in this particular case, I think the very low probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars, combined with the very low probability of any measurable harm being done to those people by Google's response, makes me conclude that this is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would call "broken."
On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing.
For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display.
And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query.
There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action.
Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.
It also seems rather unlikely that someone would search for "2+22", but not obviously any more or less unlikely than "2+2", and building a calculator into your search engine is trivially easy compared to handling natural language queries, so it's not a useful comparison.
> Whether the user meant to ask a different question is irrelevant.
Of course it's relevant. If Google can correctly determine what question the user meant to ask, then obviously Google should provide an answer that provides value to the user instead of trolling the user with nitpicking about spelling or what have you. If you ask Google for the "capitol of India" you'll get New Delhi, even though that is the "capital" of India, and arguably the "capitol" of India is actually the Chandigarh Capitol Complex, so the result is "objectively wrong".
I would argue that it's roughly just as clear that the query intends to refer to the Moon as it is that the query intends to refer to the Canadian Neil Armstrong who was killed in a plane crash in the Antarctic in 1994.
Yes, people probably don't make this exact query in good faith very often, but it raises significant concerns for other queries where google tries to supply an answer.
See for example: https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...
Edit, yes I'm wrong, did a mental s/mars/moon/ without noticing.
BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at Google left the building and got replaced with growth marketers.
Is this the transition they made to AI powered rankings a couple of years ago?
To me it just seems like a query that is likely to trip any imperfect entity up, since a "when" question usually implies that the event in question is known to have happened.