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Image description: Google search for "extant languages"
Including results for [extinct languages]
Search only for [extant languages]
(Originally published on mastodon.social: 2024-02-17)
I find that almost 100% of the time that search engines try to correct me to display better results they are wrong and I’d rather have received no results than what they showed me.
They’d rather show you some wrong ads than no ads at all.
Surely this fucking idiot just misspelled “extinct.”
To be honest, that’s probably what happens more often than people searching “extant”
I’d say that was the extant of it.
Ma! They’re enshittifyin’ my googles again!!
Read this in the voice of Zeke from Bob’s Burgers
I can’t help but feel this is related to the nebulousness of the intended search term. For example, would you have expected Latin to show up on the list of extant languages? Because in terms of language death, it’s extinct
@gila I also tried searching for "live languages" and google auto-substituted a search for "love languages"
Again its inference would be shaped by the search results that exist, not necessarily just the query. I'm saying there's not a result Google searchers generally agree upon for a search term "live languages" because algorithmically it is not meaningfully separate from just "languages". Whereas I imagine there would be for "love languages" because of the romance languages, e.g. Spanish French Italian
@gila nevertheless, I searched for real words and it showed me neither what I asked for or something similar but just some random words that are spelled similar. They could have been at least a little more useful if they'd simply done nothing
I get that, I don't think that's related to some failure of Google though. The problem originates with the different meaning of "extinct" in relation to language, and consequently the meaning of its opposite. I think what you're looking for is "living languages", and you'd need a full-on LLM search assistant to be able to make a connection between "extant" and "living" languages because generally those aren't synonyms.
@gila or they could have searched for "extant languages" when I searched for extant languages and searched for "live languages" when I searched for live languages
If it did, then you’d still not get any relevant results, because again, those aren’t things. A list of extant languages would simply be a list of all languages throughout history that aren’t delineated as some kind of proto-language developed by early humans. Such specificity is not at all conveyed by the term “extant languages”. The search engine can’t reply, “under what circumstances are they extant? Are Klingon, C++, Heiroglyphs desired results? They’re extant!”
I would agree insofar as “live languages” should autocorrect to “living languages”, but it is getting pretty into the weeds linguistically