This idea that somehow search engines _can_ arbitrate "truth" is just so… not how any of this works or could even conceivably work.
The reason that search engines "backstop" with wikipedia is because wikipedia is a giant curated and mostly-audience-appropriate collection of knowledge.
Knowing what is "true" is so incredibly nontrivial.
@hrefna @futurebird there is also this vast disconnect - a lot of search engines and people broadly seem to think that there is a single “rightl answer to any given query.
When, j would argue, in nearly all cases there is not. That every query (and the person making the query) has a context which may or may not be known to the search engine and which can make the best answer/link for their context differ from others.
This is true even if seemingly obvious questions “how many hours in a day?”
I'm becoming increasingly resigned to the fact that I'm going to need to write my own search engine.
It was never reasonable to expect any service much less a free one to really do full text search; the data are too big.
That's the sad truth behind all this suggesting & dumbing down of results. Sometimes even species names get "corrected" to something more popular.
But if I want to be able to have everything I've read and written searchable I'm just gonna need to do it myself.
@futurebird @Rycaut If you have the time and the know-how, then go for it. Change is part of reality. Google used to be number one, before that it was Yahoo, and before that it was Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista. At the present moment it seems like Duckduckgo is doing for Google what Mastodon did for Twitter.
