What does Google say about “last day of march 2022” | Hacker News Reader

What does Google say about “last day of march 2022”

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102 pointsnsoonhui33 comments

“day of march 2022” returns this Mar 17–20 event named “2022” in Google’s magic privileged results box:

https://www.festygonuts.com/the-4th-suwannee-spring-reunion-...

Screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmUbKwCH6Cnr8PbV9igtkx9Tg6S...

There also were a lot of "Last day to do X" type college course registration deadlines on those two days: https://www.google.com/search?q="last+day"+3%2F17%2F22+3%2F2...

For January: https://www.google.com/search?q=day+of+january+2022

Wolfram alpha gets it perfectly right [1], it's not like this is an insurmountable problem. One of the reasons I use this service for simple queries like this. I think siri and other voice assistants use it under the hood as well.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=last+day+of+march+2022

There seem to be a lot of reports that Wolfram|Alpha has gotten "dumber" and this lines up with my experience. But it's still ahead of Google for a lot of queries.

Is this service still maintained? I used to use it more but it feels like it's dying.

Obviously we fell into a black hole at some point, which would explain why the past few years seem to have taken a decade to pass.

It all started with that damn gorilla.

rip harambe

Google is in Japanese on my side.

I get the following:

  2022. 開始:
  3月12日 土曜日
  終了:
  3月13日 日曜日

Which translates as:

  2022. Start:
  Saturday, March 12
  End:
  Sunday, March 13

Interestingly, this is a different result from what is reported by other people here.

For "last day of february 2022", I get the correct answer.

Surely the work of Artificial Unintelligence.

We all get date parsing wrong at some point.

Numbers are OK here. Words are sometimes hard for Mr. Google to understand.

"last day of 3/2022"

     Thursday
     March 31, 2022

"last day of march 2022"

     2022 began on
     Thursday, March 17
     and ended on
     Sunday, March 20

Perhaps we can ask Jeeves?

What an odd result.

Mine shows March 17 through 20.

Any other variation?

I see the same thing.

"2022 began on Thursday, 17 March

And ended on Sunday, 20 March"

update: a friend of mine in Japan tried the same query and got (in Japanese) that 2022 starts March 12 and ends March 13.

google.com (from Italy):

in English:

last day of march 2022-> 2022. Inizio: 17 marzo Fine: 20 marzo

in Italian:

ultimo giorno di marzo 2022->2022. Inizio: 25 marzo Fine: 27 marzo

Same

Anyone wanna to take a guess why this happened?

Machine learning nonsense would be the boring answer but I can’t resist trying to work out the pattern.

as a guess, there's some sort of popular event, and the march 2022 occurence of it ran from the 17-20th. and some ranking algorithm has decided we're all more likely to mean the event in march 2022 than the month of march 2022.

for instance, that was st patricks day weekend

Guessing...

On March 17 there was some agency news giving information on when does the astronomical or calendar winter end. It got parsed wrong by Google AI, confusing March with winter and news publication with start

I'm assuming there was some event that took place over that span that was named like "last day" or something?

just scroll down the page a little to view the "people also ask" section, and the actual list of results to view the reason why this is given as the "answer". The answer is the summary of the hits from the top search results.

It's about the Spring Equinox.

Perhaps Google has begun practicing Last Thursdayism

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism

You should see what it says about January:

https://www.google.com/search?q=last+day+of+january+2022

"2022 began on Tuesday, 25 January and ended on Saturday, 29 January"

Kagi, Searx, Bing and Brave Search can't figure answer either, 3rd result in Yandex is correct

Dates are actually pretty hard.

Not that hard

https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

Our months don't all have the same number of days. Every four years, we add a day to keep up. And our weeks have seven days, a number that isn't easy to work with.

What day of the week is March 17, 3042? Try to do it mentally.

Instead of doing it in your head, I bet you could write some code that could figure it out. In fact I bet somebody has already written that code. You could probably figure it out with 1 line of import and another line of function call. Nice to work on problems other people have solved already.

But if you’re Google that would be too easy. Googlers aren’t paid to solve easy problems. They’re paid to solve the worlds hardest problems. You don’t get promoted by importing somebody else’s calendar library that just works.

First day is the same result. :-)

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