I understand how this happened but I cannot help but notice that is literally the opposite of what I asked for

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)

14 comments

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

14 comments