Rod HiltonAug 15, 2023

Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K":

- DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

- Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

"There are no countries in Africa that start with K."
"What about Kenya?"
"Kenya suck deez nuts?"

Google Search is over.

Show threadCaryJMAug 15, 2023
@rodhilton Not that this contradicts the main point (that Google Search is over, which I agree with) but this same query in Google for me provides the correct result. Incredibly low bar but it does come back correct.
Show threadRod HiltonAug 15, 2023
@Caryjm the fact that Google was doing this went viral on a lot of socials and I believe there was a frontpage HN post about it as well, so Google has patched the query to fix this. It's working for me now as well.
Show threadClickyMcTicker
@rodhilton @Caryjm It still produces the incorrect result as of this post. The suggested search query omits “the letter” from the query (see my other comment) which produces a correct result.
Aug 15, 2023 at 9:35pmWeb
Show threadRAKAug 15, 2023
@ClickyMcTicker @rodhilton @Caryjm: Unfortunately, I appear, even without "the letter", to get the incorrect result.