HN Explorer

18 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 51.5 ms ] thread
dehef
What's the point?
danblick
I believe your question is "it shows Obama, so what?", is that right?
dsfyu404ed
That Google hasn't automated the process of inferring that the question was about the current president.

This generalizes to pretty much any official position.

walshemj
During the last UK election they got 3 out of the 4 main party leaders wrong for searches about "general election 2017"
moonka
Lies we tell ourselves to get to sleep at night.
tdb7893
I think Google is a little the victim of it's own success. They are never going to be as perfect as we expect on these answers
strathmeyer
"how old is the US president" gives the correct answer. Most other inputs don't try to return an exact value.
amingilani
Can someone share what they're seeing? I'm not in the US and there isn't a knowledge card, which is what I think the Americans are seeing.

The first result on the page for me is:

List of Presidents of the United States by age - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit... This is a list of presidents of the United States by age. The first table charts the age of each ... 55 years and 6 months, which is about how old Benjamin Harrison was at the time of his inauguration. ... The youngest living president is Barack Obama, born August 4, 1961 (age 700420517000000000056 years, 63 days).

wskinner
When I search from the USA, it displays a card informing me that Barack Obama is 56 years old.
sin7
Barack Obama / Age 56 years August 4, 1961
jsjohnst
> age 700420517000000000056 years

Hmmm.... I don’t believe President Obama is older than the universe. YMMV!

cobookman
FYI for transparency. I have informed the google search team of this undesirable search behavior.

I am a google employee within google cloud. So can't talk about why you see Obama instead of Trump but good catch.

[dead] jkolyer
We already know why we see Obama instead of Trump. And we know why your search results are obviously skewed with serious political bias.

The google brand is forever tainted.

_MK_
Someone brought their tin foil hat today.
vorotato
So you mean an AI struggles to adjust to changes, say it ain't so.