
Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth - ryanatallah
https://www.google.com/search?q=distance+earth+to+sun&oq=distance+earth+to+sun
======
ridiculous_fish
Google was also quite confident that the alphabet starts with J and ends with
G.
[https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/86609697117344972...](https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/866096971173449729)

Just tried it again, now it both starts and ends with A. 50% improvement ain't
bad.

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d--b
Distance Earth-Sun = 1 AU

1e6 AU = 15.81 light years.

Somebody did not pick up the 'e6' part...

~~~
cjensen
Pretty much. The sidebar references Wikipedia's List of brightest stars [1].
That table has the distance from Earth to the Sun in lightyears. So maybe a
parsing problem with 0.000015813. On the January 21st this was changed from
0.000&nbsp;015&nbsp;813, so it may have been parsing that wrong.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_table_of_the_brightest_stars)

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Figs
Huh... with JavaScript off, I get the answer "Distance from Sun: 92.96 million
" (presumably miles) on the right hand side. With JavaScript on, I get the
wrong answer from the title.

Edit: Actually, it gets the same answer on the right side with JS enabled;
didn't notice that earlier. So just the instant answer is missing in the JS-
disabled case.

Also, here's a screenshot for posterity (with JS enabled):
[https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png](https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png)

~~~
muthdra
Screenshot from Brazil:
[https://i.imgur.com/ODEtS0Q.png](https://i.imgur.com/ODEtS0Q.png)

~~~
vinchuco
[https://www.google.com/search?&q=distance+from+brazil+to+sun](https://www.google.com/search?&q=distance+from+brazil+to+sun)

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pizza
Google seems to think that Earth is Gliese 412

 _Gliese 412 is a pair of stars that share a common proper motion through
space and are thought to form a binary star system. The pair have an angular
separation of 31.4″ at a position angle of 126.1°.[12] They are located 15.8
light years distant from the Sun in the constellation Ursa Major. Both
components are relatively dim red dwarf stars._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412)

~~~
TomK32
It's still cloudy here in Austria, I'll count the number of suns later when
the clouds are gone.

~~~
austrianguy
Not so cloudy in Burgenland, I only see one. But I don't have a telescope with
a sun filter to scientifically prove it.

~~~
majewsky
I got confused at your mention of "Burgenland" together with your nick, which
led me to find out that "Burgenland" and "Burgenlandkreis" (Burgenland county)
are two different counties in two different countries:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenlandkreis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenlandkreis)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgenland)

~~~
austrianguy
Well that's new to me too. Thanks for the links!

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Cybiote
As of this posting, if you put a "what" in front of the query, it returns the
correct average distance. I suspected the parser, even if it was learned, is
sensitive to the query format.

Despite what the press teams of large companies will tell you, our ability to
model language is still in its early infancy.

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isoprophlex
If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the
results are correct...

~~~
smt88
Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost
unusable.

I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It
was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and
completely useless to me.

~~~
binarycrusader
bing seems to get this right in both instant search and otherwise.

~~~
zenexer
I'm slowly switching to Bing--not because Bing is getting better, but because
Google is getting worse. Google consistently ignores key terms in my queries,
and searches are getting slower and slower. Remember when Google used to have
that little timer in the top-right corner of the search results? Not
anymore...

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mikexstudios
Wolfram alpha for comparison:
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+sun+to+e...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+sun+to+earth+in+light+years)

~~~
d--b
WA thinks the distance is 0.9843 AU...

~~~
thecompilr
That is probably the current distance. 1 AU is the mean distance.

~~~
Someone
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit):

 _”Originally conceived as the average of Earth 's aphelion and perihelion”_

[https://www.britannica.com/science/astronomical-
unit](https://www.britannica.com/science/astronomical-unit):

 _”a unit of length effectively equal to the average, or mean, distance
between Earth and the Sun”_

I wondered whether the two are equal. A bit to my surprise, they are
([http://www.farmingdale.edu/faculty/sheldon-
gordon/RecentArti...](http://www.farmingdale.edu/faculty/sheldon-
gordon/RecentArticles/average-distance-in-ellipse.doc))

(If we take into account that earth moves faster near its perihelion, I think
that will break down)

And, nitpick, nowadays, the AU apparently is exactly 149,597,870,700 meters.

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maaaats
Not only is Google "borrowing" content from others to show directly in the
search results, more often than not it's completely wrong. Either because they
have failed to parse the data correctly, or because it's from some shady web
page (happens when googling stuff related to vaccines for instance).

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ryanatallah
"Earth distance to sun" gives the correct answer:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=e...](https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=earth+distance+from+sun)

~~~
mkl
Interesting. It says 149.6 _million_ km, which is correct.

[distance earth to sun in km] gives 149.6 _trillion_ km, which is 15.81 light
years.

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nv-vn
the magic of machine learning, everybody

~~~
innagadadavida
they are using AI, not machine learning.

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compsciphd
I'm not sure I like Google's attempt to solve global warming.

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kevinslashslash
My son likes to ask our Google Home the distance to different planets. The
numbers, though generally technically correct (sun has worked in the past),
are misleading as some are minimum, some average distance and some maximum.

For example "distance to mars" says 54.6 million km, which is the theoretical
minimum. "distance to venus" says 261 million km which is maximum. I believe
it was Jupiter that previously gave an average distance but now I'm seeing
minimum.

~~~
mehrdadn
By the "[maximum] distance to different planets" do you really mean literally
that, or do you mean the maximum distances to their orbits?

~~~
function_seven
Wouldn’t those be the same? The periods of each planet’s orbit aren’t
factors/multiples of one another, so eventually any two will be at opposite
points in their orbit.

~~~
mehrdadn
The maximum distance between two ellipses is not the same as the maximum
distance between all pairs of points on them right? Like just imagine
measuring the maximum distance from a circular orbit to itself. One measure
would give zero (zero separation between the orbits) and the other would give
twice the radius (individual points can be 2R away from each other).

If I'm doing this correctly I think the max distance between two points would
come out to max_x max_y ||x - y|| whereas the max distance to the orbit would
come out to max_x min_y ||x - y||.

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orliesaurus
A little parsing error here, a little parsing error there...

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sigmaprimus
Someone should win a bug bounty for that one !

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thebyrd
But it seems to get it right if you ask the same question in the opposite
order
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+Distance+from+Sun](https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+Distance+from+Sun)

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crististm
Have a glimpse at the kind of errors we will be facing with the machine-
learning AI in the near future.

How do we debug them and how do we know there is an error to correct in the
first place?

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billrobertson42
Google's systems do not, "think."

~~~
jsolson
Having interacted with a lot of computers over the years (including Google's
for the last several of my employment), the machines at Google come as close
to thinking as I've ever encountered. Two or three times a day they come up
with answers that I cannot begin to comprehend how they arrived at. Sometimes
they are brilliant, sometimes they are dumb, and sometimes they are merely
mad.

They give every coworker I've ever had a run for their money on catching my
fuckups.

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keitarofujiwara
We should send satellites to Alpha Centauri before Google figures this out.

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oh-kumudo
If you google distance between Sun and Earth, Google gets it right.

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omarforgotpwd
the AIs are coming to kill us any day now

~~~
zenexer
At this rate, they're more likely to jump off a cliff than kill anyone.

