According To Google, Barack Obama Is King Of The United States

Ask Google who is the [King Of United States] and Google will inform you that it is Barack Obama, the current President of the United States. The Google Answer is pulled from Breitbart, a story they posted five days ago named All Hail King Barack Obama, Emperor Of The United States Of America! It appears […]

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Ask Google who is the [King Of United States] and Google will inform you that it is Barack Obama, the current President of the United States.

The Google Answer is pulled from Breitbart, a story they posted five days ago named All Hail King Barack Obama, Emperor Of The United States Of America!

It appears that Google picked up that story and assigned it to their Google Answers database, potentially filled within their knowledge graph.

Why would Google show this answer when it is clearly wrong? Is it an Easter Egg? I strongly doubt it. But it does look to be a case where Google got it wrong when it comes to getting answers from third party sources.

This does remind me of the classic Google Bombs, where marketers were able to influence the search results to return specific articles based on specific queries. Google shut that down for the most part, but I guess this is an example of a Google Answers Bomb…

Via landt.co via Hacker News.

Postscript: Well, now it seems this site is powering the answer for this query:

Screen Shot 2014-11-25 at 7.47.43 PM


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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