Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
Alas, it has the emergent mind answer ranked fairly high still, and when search result was set to my country it was actually ranked highest.
Also, if you use Quick Answer, you’ll get same wrong answer:
Quick Answer There are no countries in Africa whose name starts fully with the letter “K”. While Kenya is the closest match, its name does not start solely with “K” [1]. All of the African countries’ names were reviewed across multiple sources and none began completely with the letter “K” [2][3][4].
Cool thing about kagi though. I added emergent mind to my blocked domains list, and now the quick answer displays the proper answer. Still not ideal but better than no options at all to fix it
Yeah I actually just found that functionality myself today when I was looking at how I could get rid of the very same emergent mind result.
However, it seems that my quick answer got cached, at least for a while, so it stayed the same even if the results now were different.
Kagi’s “quick answer” gives me a better result:
Quick Answer
The countries in Africa that start with the letter K are: Kenya Kazakhstan [1]
[1] List of countries in Africa in alphabetical order
Though I don’t know if that’s because Kagi has fixed it in the last half hour, or some other factor. Still not a great answer. At least Kagi doesn’t show it by default, at least with my settings.
