<story><title>Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dTal</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not even sure Google&amp;#x27;s behaviour is wrong in this instance. The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that is probably actually more interested in the woo-answer, and I don&amp;#x27;t neccesarily think it&amp;#x27;s Google&amp;#x27;s job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it&amp;#x27;s risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).&lt;p&gt;To illustrate with another example, if I ask Google where the government is hiding the aliens, I&amp;#x27;m probably more interested in the answer &amp;quot;Area 51&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;the government isn&amp;#x27;t hiding any aliens&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>muzani</author><text>My favorite example is &amp;quot;are lemons acidic?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s full of &amp;quot;alkaline diet&amp;quot; sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they&amp;#x27;re an alkaline. It&amp;#x27;s become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy.&lt;p&gt;Then again the answers are so consistent and I&amp;#x27;m so used to trusting the first page of Google that I&amp;#x27;m almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;2 Balances pH: Lemons are an incredibly alkaline food, believe it or not. Yes, they are acidic on their own, but inside our bodies they&amp;#x27;re alkaline (the citric acid does not create acidity in the body once metabolized&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s what I get in the answer box. Wow.&lt;p&gt;I think it absolutely is Google&amp;#x27;s job to be the woo police &lt;i&gt;in the privileged answer box&lt;/i&gt;. They can just choose not to  display it for answers they&amp;#x27;re not confident in owning and leave you with the general search results.&lt;p&gt;It probably needs to be a whitelist. Most of the time it&amp;#x27;s wikipedia anyway (a whole other can of worms, but at least it won&amp;#x27;t tell you that lemons are alkaline or feed your conspiracy theories)</text></comment>
<story><title>Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dTal</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not even sure Google&amp;#x27;s behaviour is wrong in this instance. The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that is probably actually more interested in the woo-answer, and I don&amp;#x27;t neccesarily think it&amp;#x27;s Google&amp;#x27;s job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it&amp;#x27;s risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).&lt;p&gt;To illustrate with another example, if I ask Google where the government is hiding the aliens, I&amp;#x27;m probably more interested in the answer &amp;quot;Area 51&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;the government isn&amp;#x27;t hiding any aliens&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>muzani</author><text>My favorite example is &amp;quot;are lemons acidic?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s full of &amp;quot;alkaline diet&amp;quot; sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they&amp;#x27;re an alkaline. It&amp;#x27;s become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy.&lt;p&gt;Then again the answers are so consistent and I&amp;#x27;m so used to trusting the first page of Google that I&amp;#x27;m almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DarkCrusader2</author><text>&amp;gt; The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that&lt;p&gt;Yes, no kid is ever gonna google that. While we are at it, let&amp;#x27;s show that earth is flat when someone google for image of earth&amp;#x27;s curvature because why would you search that. You obviously are a flat-earther.</text></comment>