Google knows everything. If you need a question answered, you simply Google it and the sum total of human investigation and reasoning pushes the answer forth onto your computer screen. That is, as long as you don’t ask Google what happened to the dinosaurs.
https://twitter.com/davidslounge/status/603035682580267008
As recently as Tuesday morning, a Google query for the question “What happened to the dinosaurs?” returned a result that science has unanimously declared to be wildly incorrect. The algorithm that scours Google’s top search results and presents what it believes to be the answer in bold at the top of a search page returned the following response:
The heavily religious response was pulled from a Christian website that bills itself as a source “dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Needless today, it’s not the first place you’d go looking for information on prehistoric beasts.
A brief Twitter campaign to flag and report the response as being incorrect seems to have worked, and while the result still appears on the search page, it is no longer promoted as the definitive explanation.
Photo via Lehigh Valley, PA/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)