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.
