Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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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?”
Alas, it has the emergent mind answer ranked fairly high still, and when search result was set to my country it was actually ranked highest.
Also, if you use Quick Answer, you’ll get same wrong answer:
Quick Answer There are no countries in Africa whose name starts fully with the letter “K”. While Kenya is the closest match, its name does not start solely with “K” [1]. All of the African countries’ names were reviewed across multiple sources and none began completely with the letter “K” [2][3][4].
Kagi’s “quick answer” gives me a better result:
Though I don’t know if that’s because Kagi has fixed it in the last half hour, or some other factor. Still not a great answer. At least Kagi doesn’t show it by default, at least with my settings.
I think it’s just based on which 4-6 search results are ranked on top for you / your country, and then that’s used as basis for the quick answer. It also seems to cache the quick answer so even after I forced it so downrank some results, my answer was the same.
Cool thing about kagi though. I added emergent mind to my blocked domains list, and now the quick answer displays the proper answer. Still not ideal but better than no options at all to fix it
The internet really is unusable without some way to block user/sites/etc… That’s Kagi’s single greatest feature.
Yeah I actually just found that functionality myself today when I was looking at how I could get rid of the very same emergent mind result.
However, it seems that my quick answer got cached, at least for a while, so it stayed the same even if the results now were different.