There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results
1. w3schools
2. pinterest
3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers)
4. all the code clones for SO
5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.
6. The best of lists. Google for the love of god, please ban them.. they are always always SEO spam and product placements. Often the blog post itself says "to put your product on this list pay us a $1000 and we will include them in our list."
7. Quora and similar answer sites.. okay it's a mixed bag but you have to be very careful on these sites as most often the answers are just spam. I never read any answer with a link in it. But I think it's more Quora's problem than google. But if google is strict with them they may do a better job at moderating I guess. Also now quora hides answers and asks for a payment. Did they learn nothing from experts-exchange!
I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children.
We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore).
On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.
Google flight's true genius is being able to search multiple city-pairs.
Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a business class flight, but want to save some money.
Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form one European airport to another.
Google flights will let you search for the best combination of flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports, and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports in multiple countries.
So, you could search for a flight that originates in some combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any other 6 large European airports).
Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length (say, 14-days) over an entire month.
Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.
In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400 individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives me in a single screen.
It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.
There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but Google Flights is amazing.
Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010 (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to continue licensing their software out for years afterwards, though I think it expired in ~2016.
I personally like to use Momondo. Have had pretty good experience with Momondo over the years so far. I haven’t tried Expedia, so I can’t directly compare it. But I recommend giving Momondo a try anyways.
I will also plug Kayak as being the only other decent flight search site.
The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies. Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.
The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months).
So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming.
As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful.
When I see a site like that, I can be quite sure there is no value to me from that site. I want to blacklist it - not forever (though I'd settle for that) but so I don't see it in search results again.
The crazy thing is that this could even be a benefit for Google themselves. They could aggregate these signals and use them to identify SEO scammers, since their algorithms clearly can't. I'm sure that Google aren't happy with the lacklustre performance of their search in modern times.
> Blocks sites you specify from appearing in Google search results
This extension prevents the sites you specify from appearing in Google search results.
There is a programmable search feature [0] that lets you limit search to a defined list of sites. Someone did a ShowHN a few months ago where they had built a programmable search with 200ish common sites that a stereotype HN reader might like (software documentation, wikipedia, reddit, some news and other media, etc), and it was actually pretty good.
I've said before, google is now basically what I'd call a "smart" portal site. For most stuff, you already know the handful of sites you might want to look at, and google just sort of brings you there from a relatively clean interface, as opposed to a traditional portal that would have lots of categorized nested links to traverse. In most cases you're not searching for a random site that you wouldn't know existed if it wasn't indexed, like in 1998. So the whitelist approach actually works pretty well.
Current Google search doesn't add features, it removes them (see end of + sign and other stuff). This is sadly the logical behavior of a "mature product". When you own the market, your rational question is "how much can I extract from the customers who already must come to me" and that means becoming more and more directive towards the customer. Letting the customers customize only stands against this.
This used to be a feature of Google Search. It then moved from the Google Account to Chrome. I'm not sure if it still exists in the Chrome browser. It can be done with addons but of course that doesn't feed back to Google.
It does surprise me that Google wouldn't want to capture this signal. Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?
This is not only a problem with Google search. DDG is now also flooded with auto (AI?) generated content. For example there are now loads of websites about programming topics. They look real but always lack the main point of the article which makes you navigate to other articles on the same website.
This is a great idea. On YouTube I use the 'Don't recommend channel' button a lot and consequently the algorithm has learned to filter out a lot of the nonsense.
> So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites ...
The problem is, since these sites dominate the SERPS, there is little incentive for anyone to offer the result you want. As a consequence, the web page that would satisfy your request probably doesn't exist.
The problem, as always, is credibility. If they're not careful about the credibility of the aggregate blocking signal, this would become another tool in the SEO scammer toolbox as they use sockpuppet accounts to downmoderate their competitors.
kagi.com allows you to adjust from the results page how often you want to see a page in the results or just block it entirely. I don't think there is a way to temporarily ban though.
An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions, or I'm not thinking about the problem the right way. For example, you come up with some weird programming idea to solve a problem and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. This has been proved to me over and over again as sort of a canary in the search coal mine.
Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.
it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally fewer pages on the internet.
Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in lower revenue for Google.
The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case.
Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut.
Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.
For Python programming I would say 100% of the time you should look the answer up in the official manual for a well-defined problem (delete a file) because the manual is correct, well-written, etc. It's astonishing how often Google and Bing snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on queries like this.
If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse you will get answers that "aren't even wrong".
Google is not great for code search, but I dislike this "rich snippet" thing.
These engines are stealing the sites traffic. The whole point was to be a search engine, not an encyclopedia. If you want to be the latter, produce your own content.
It's my opinion. I don't use those engines because of that. They jeopardize their sources. It's unsustainable.
Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago, I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's rivals & switched to their tactics?
Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing. As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching for recipes.
Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had some nice features in this article.
Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.
One Google feature that I miss terribly is hard filtering.
Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach [], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best.
--
[] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard filters on top.
> Is this page any better than what you’d have gotten in 2010? What if it looked like this instead?
I can't take seriously an example that still puts w3schools as the first search result. If I were searching for a simple answer about a language feature, I would want the search engine to give me a page from the definitive authoritative source on that language. w3schools isn't that.
I would say that I have the exact opposite experience.
My company is moving from IE to Edge as the default browser and I search for code issues on Edge (Bing). I usually do not like the results and then have to manually type in Google.com > search for code issues as that gives me better results.
Google lags behind in Image search quality too, surprisingly. Bing consistently does better for me at least.
Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not surprisingly.
In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the job done.
But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck.
Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.
Also noticed a recent change that Google did, if I search for e.g:- Volvo XC 60, it does not show me the Volvo XC 60 page on Volvo.com, it instead shows the ad that Volvo paid for and a bunch of other ads.
So they essentially don’t want you to click on the organic link that points to Volvo.com.
They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links.
This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they are actually evil..
It is especially frustrating to use when Google while coding. I've noticed an increase in SEO sites on Google that seem to just scrape Q&As from the internet and regurgitate them[0]. I've recently started trying other search engines like DuckDuckGo and You.com and thankfully haven't had any issues with these sorts of sites popping up as results. It makes debugging 10x faster not having to sift through so many fake answer sites.
Wasn't there just an article about how horizontal services get eaten away by focused rivals once a market has been identified? [1] Like Indeed doing job search better than Craiglist.
I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'll never happen because Google defines what that means, and it's a moving target.
I'm wondering why Google hasn't done this themselves? Whitelist a bunch of decent websites and give the search page a fun URL like "Cookle".
> I already know what an Exception is, so I don't want to scroll halfway down the page to find what I'm looking for.
I can’t relate to this. That example, of the first result being the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine working exactly the way I want.
A low-hanging improvement Google can do easily: a one-line warning that its smart results may be wrong, and caution people to check all result pages and domains.
Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.
An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century.
But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.
A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.
Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed.
Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.
[+] [-] superasn|3 years ago|reply
1. w3schools
2. pinterest
3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers)
4. all the code clones for SO
5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.
6. The best of lists. Google for the love of god, please ban them.. they are always always SEO spam and product placements. Often the blog post itself says "to put your product on this list pay us a $1000 and we will include them in our list."
7. Quora and similar answer sites.. okay it's a mixed bag but you have to be very careful on these sites as most often the answers are just spam. I never read any answer with a link in it. But I think it's more Quora's problem than google. But if google is strict with them they may do a better job at moderating I guess. Also now quora hides answers and asks for a payment. Did they learn nothing from experts-exchange!
[+] [-] kshacker|3 years ago|reply
We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore).
On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.
[+] [-] atourgates|3 years ago|reply
Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a business class flight, but want to save some money.
Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form one European airport to another.
Google flights will let you search for the best combination of flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports, and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports in multiple countries.
So, you could search for a flight that originates in some combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any other 6 large European airports).
Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length (say, 14-days) over an entire month.
Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.
In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400 individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives me in a single screen.
It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.
There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but Google Flights is amazing.
[+] [-] Sebguer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codetrotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdponx|3 years ago|reply
The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies. Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cush|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beachy|3 years ago|reply
So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming.
As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful.
When I see a site like that, I can be quite sure there is no value to me from that site. I want to blacklist it - not forever (though I'd settle for that) but so I don't see it in search results again.
The crazy thing is that this could even be a benefit for Google themselves. They could aggregate these signals and use them to identify SEO scammers, since their algorithms clearly can't. I'm sure that Google aren't happy with the lacklustre performance of their search in modern times.
[+] [-] chewz|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
[+] [-] gwbas1c|3 years ago|reply
I wish I could do that at Hacker News too.
I really just don't want anything from medium.com.
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
I've said before, google is now basically what I'd call a "smart" portal site. For most stuff, you already know the handful of sites you might want to look at, and google just sort of brings you there from a relatively clean interface, as opposed to a traditional portal that would have lots of categorized nested links to traverse. In most cases you're not searching for a random site that you wouldn't know existed if it wasn't indexed, like in 1998. So the whitelist approach actually works pretty well.
[0] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/
[+] [-] joe_the_user|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mulmen|3 years ago|reply
It does surprise me that Google wouldn't want to capture this signal. Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?
[+] [-] blenderdt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyApplePRNG|3 years ago|reply
Any ranking manoeuvrability that Google offers can and will be used against them.
The SEO scammers out there would just automate millions of proxy IP addresses to blacklist all of their competitors sites.
[+] [-] nomilk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|3 years ago|reply
I can’t think of any reason why a spam Pinterest link has any value, yet it’s ranked high.
[+] [-] benrapscallion|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headsoup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physicsgraph|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dazc|3 years ago|reply
The problem is, since these sites dominate the SERPS, there is little incentive for anyone to offer the result you want. As a consequence, the web page that would satisfy your request probably doesn't exist.
[+] [-] wetpaws|3 years ago|reply
It is absolutely impossible to find anything anymore, I gave up on google for all intents and purposes and use it exclusively as reddit indexer.
[+] [-] Pxtl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holografix|3 years ago|reply
They get crowds of people and/or scripts to blacklist all other sites.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Giorgi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajmurmann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattwad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flenserboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigcat123|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|3 years ago|reply
Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.
[+] [-] endisneigh|3 years ago|reply
Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in lower revenue for Google.
[+] [-] mywittyname|3 years ago|reply
Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut.
Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse you will get answers that "aren't even wrong".
[+] [-] rg111|3 years ago|reply
Yesterday, I searched "best after-sale service of AC". What I was shown was SEO'd pure junk. Absolute junk as the first result.
Next few were the same, but more focused on affiliate programs rather than providing genuine info.
Down the line was Quora, where _sales rep of AC companies_ wrote answers that _theirs_ had the best service.
I wad very disappointed.
You.com showed me better result right away.
My Kagi and You use is now on par with my Google use. They mights surpass Google soon.
I still find Google to be the best for programming answers btw.
I would also say that Google's ad business is in direct conflict of interest with its search business.
[+] [-] rmbyrro|3 years ago|reply
These engines are stealing the sites traffic. The whole point was to be a search engine, not an encyclopedia. If you want to be the latter, produce your own content.
It's my opinion. I don't use those engines because of that. They jeopardize their sources. It's unsustainable.
[+] [-] mattferderer|3 years ago|reply
Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing. As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching for recipes.
Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had some nice features in this article.
Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.
[+] [-] simsla|3 years ago|reply
Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach [], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best.
--
[] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard filters on top.
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
"When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730
[+] [-] azangru|3 years ago|reply
I can't take seriously an example that still puts w3schools as the first search result. If I were searching for a simple answer about a language feature, I would want the search engine to give me a page from the definitive authoritative source on that language. w3schools isn't that.
[+] [-] blahyawnblah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ab_testing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|3 years ago|reply
Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not surprisingly.
In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the job done.
But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck.
Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.
[+] [-] victor106|3 years ago|reply
So they essentially don’t want you to click on the organic link that points to Volvo.com.
They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links.
This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they are actually evil..
[+] [-] big_blind|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-dj...
[+] [-] russellbeattie|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'll never happen because Google defines what that means, and it's a moving target.
I'm wondering why Google hasn't done this themselves? Whitelist a bunch of decent websites and give the search page a fun URL like "Cookle".
1. https://www.georgesequeira.com/writing/zapier-the-5b-unbundl...
[+] [-] aendruk|3 years ago|reply
I can’t relate to this. That example, of the first result being the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine working exactly the way I want.
[+] [-] lovelearning|3 years ago|reply
Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.
An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century.
But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.
A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.
Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed.
Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.