Ask HN: How did "US presidents in order" result on Google happen?

6 points·ggm··5 comments

Multiple confirmed worldwide examples of the search skipping over Biden's presidency. Without descending into conspiracy theory, what inputs inside Google could cause this response and what issues cause Google to continue it?

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https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fb...

> what inputs inside Google could cause this response

My guess: Google's knowledge graph had references pointing to Joe Biden that, on inauguration, needed to be updated to Donald Trump so that answers to queries like "who is US head of state" don't linger on whoever happened to be president when they last scraped that information. In this process, they made the mistake here of replacing Biden's entry with Trump's entry, instead of appending Trump's entry.

> and what issues cause Google to continue it?

Seems as though it was fixed relatively quickly after it was noticed. May take a while for changes to propagate out, given Google's scale.

If I google the phrase now, it includes Biden.

Glad it's fixed, but my question remains, because it lasted over 3 hours. That's a very long time in my world.

(I don't know how much over 3 hours, because I only noticed the reddit post around 3 hours ago.)

Seems pretty fast if you ask me. If it either was a bug or someone did something nefarious, in a big corp like google... 3 hours are more like 1 second.

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