For anyone who's curious but not enough to actually run the search themselves, the top results (using the string without quotes) all relate to how many raccoons can fit into a human anus.
No, I am not joking, and this is the result of 20+ years of web search development and decades of cutting edge AI research, right here.
Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days. It has close to zero clue about quality or relevance.
Well, apparently it's a meme. Yes it's objectively terrible, but I'll bet 80% of people searching for "how many raccoons can fit" are actually looking for those results. (I mean, unless you're buying a container to transport your twenty pet raccoons, it's just not the kind of phrase most people would spontaneously search for.)
Basically, it's as relevant as searching for "the answer to life" and getting results spammed with 42.
> Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days.
Sorry, that is a bit over the top. What result would you expect for that query? Folks took a silly premise and made a joke about it and google in the absence of anything more relevant shows you their joke. While i was typing this query in I had to ignore the much more usefull suggestions:
“How many raccoons in a litter”, “How many raccoons in the world”, “How many raccoons are in the us”, “How many raccoons live together”
And it provided reasonable looking lead to answer all of these question. And it did this while I was seriously mistyping the animal’s name!
If you don’t recognize how amazing this is then you left your blinders on. Let’s take this query for example: “How many raccoons are in the us”. This is a well formed human question, but it is not how one used to query a search engine. You were supposed to try to guess what words would appear on your imagined page and type those in. So for example you would type in “raccoon population us”. Except of course you were supposed to also know that the word “us” is ambigous, and appears too often in the wrong sense, so you would transform it to “United States” to help the machine. So by the expectations and conventions of the early google this is a badly formed query. A user error realky, yet now it can answer it! And it doesn’t just gives me a link where there might be an answer. Oh, no! It pulls the most important sentence out of the page and pasts it over the link.
This. Is. Freaking. Magic.
Are there mistakes? Sure. The linked serial killer thing is quite bad for example. But if you pick the raccoon example as your main argument then you lost me.
I've been spending a lot of time doing home improvements and have often been frustrated by how difficult it is to get past marketing and spun content to find the information I need. Similarly I've struggled when researching some of the gnarlier aspects of leadership and the challenges that one has to deal with.
I'm sorry but whilst, yes, Google can perform some superficially impressive parlour tricks, it's simply not that great when you're looking for in-depth information, and it's particularly bad when you're looking for information that's not that far outside the mainstream but just enough so that what you need is buried in the midst of irrelevancies. Also frustrating when it keeps feeding you results that are from the "wrong" perspective (by which I mean not the perspective you're looking for, not that there's anything inherently wrong with the content being served up).
It is not magic at all: magic would yield better and more useful results.
"how many raccoons can fit"