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Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth

125 points| ryanatallah | 8 years ago |google.com

64 comments

order

d--b|8 years ago

Distance Earth-Sun = 1 AU

1e6 AU = 15.81 light years.

Somebody did not pick up the 'e6' part...

cjensen|8 years ago

Pretty much. The sidebar references Wikipedia's List of brightest stars [1]. That table has the distance from Earth to the Sun in lightyears. So maybe a parsing problem with 0.000015813. On the January 21st this was changed from 0.000 015 813, so it may have been parsing that wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_t...

Figs|8 years ago

Huh... with JavaScript off, I get the answer "Distance from Sun: 92.96 million " (presumably miles) on the right hand side. With JavaScript on, I get the wrong answer from the title.

Edit: Actually, it gets the same answer on the right side with JS enabled; didn't notice that earlier. So just the instant answer is missing in the JS-disabled case.

Also, here's a screenshot for posterity (with JS enabled): https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png

Adverblessly|8 years ago

With JS disabled I get "Distance from Sun: 149.6 millio...", presumably kilometers. Incidentally, thank you Google for filling half of my monitor with whitespace...

killerdhmo|8 years ago

I tried now on my Google Home, same query, same result.

pizza|8 years ago

Google seems to think that Earth is Gliese 412

Gliese 412 is a pair of stars that share a common proper motion through space and are thought to form a binary star system. The pair have an angular separation of 31.4″ at a position angle of 126.1°.[12] They are located 15.8 light years distant from the Sun in the constellation Ursa Major. Both components are relatively dim red dwarf stars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412

TomK32|8 years ago

It's still cloudy here in Austria, I'll count the number of suns later when the clouds are gone.

Cybiote|8 years ago

As of this posting, if you put a "what" in front of the query, it returns the correct average distance. I suspected the parser, even if it was learned, is sensitive to the query format.

Despite what the press teams of large companies will tell you, our ability to model language is still in its early infancy.

isoprophlex|8 years ago

If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

smt88|8 years ago

Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable.

I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.

MiddleEndian|8 years ago

If you look at my post history, at some point I used google to determine the average words spoken per day. I initially trusted Google's answer indicating women speak 2 to 3 times as many words per day on average as men (which is not true).

A quick Google search on my phone for "average number of words spoken per day" gives similar results right now. Although the text starts with an ambitious sounding phrase "previous research" it ends in present tense and has 7000 in bold for men and 20,000 in bold for women.

maaaats|8 years ago

Not only is Google "borrowing" content from others to show directly in the search results, more often than not it's completely wrong. Either because they have failed to parse the data correctly, or because it's from some shady web page (happens when googling stuff related to vaccines for instance).

nv-vn|8 years ago

the magic of machine learning, everybody

compsciphd|8 years ago

I'm not sure I like Google's attempt to solve global warming.

kevinslashslash|8 years ago

My son likes to ask our Google Home the distance to different planets. The numbers, though generally technically correct (sun has worked in the past), are misleading as some are minimum, some average distance and some maximum.

For example "distance to mars" says 54.6 million km, which is the theoretical minimum. "distance to venus" says 261 million km which is maximum. I believe it was Jupiter that previously gave an average distance but now I'm seeing minimum.

mehrdadn|8 years ago

By the "[maximum] distance to different planets" do you really mean literally that, or do you mean the maximum distances to their orbits?

orliesaurus|8 years ago

A little parsing error here, a little parsing error there...

sigmaprimus|8 years ago

Someone should win a bug bounty for that one !

crististm|8 years ago

Have a glimpse at the kind of errors we will be facing with the machine-learning AI in the near future.

How do we debug them and how do we know there is an error to correct in the first place?

billrobertson42|8 years ago

Google's systems do not, "think."

jsolson|8 years ago

Having interacted with a lot of computers over the years (including Google's for the last several of my employment), the machines at Google come as close to thinking as I've ever encountered. Two or three times a day they come up with answers that I cannot begin to comprehend how they arrived at. Sometimes they are brilliant, sometimes they are dumb, and sometimes they are merely mad.

They give every coworker I've ever had a run for their money on catching my fuckups.

smt88|8 years ago

Would you really prefer an accurate title like, "Google's machine-learning instant-answer algorithm's output is '15.81 light years from earth' when the input is 'how far away is the sun from the earth'"?

keitarofujiwara|8 years ago

We should send satellites to Alpha Centauri before Google figures this out.

oh-kumudo|8 years ago

If you google distance between Sun and Earth, Google gets it right.

omarforgotpwd|8 years ago

the AIs are coming to kill us any day now

zenexer|8 years ago

At this rate, they're more likely to jump off a cliff than kill anyone.

mar77i|8 years ago

okay, but only for at least as a grave mistake as google's.

wait. when people die for no reason whatsoever, that counts, right?

Kenji|8 years ago

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