I’ve written a lot about how Google knowledge boxes are a more and more frequent visitor to our search results and in a lot of cases they are a welcome addition. As an end user if I am searching for the current time in Sydney for example I am happy when the box pops up showing me the exact time.
Of course if I were a website owner that derived a lot of revenue from visitors to my ‘what time is it anywhere in the world’ website I might not be quite so impressed. Even less so if I found that Google was taking the result it showed from my website.
As this is an automated service it will get some things spot on and others will be wide of the mark. As time goes on more and more results are accurate but there are still some notable examples where they are missing the mark.
Here’s another one that arrived today. Ask Google for the price of a second class stamp and it happily shows the price to be 62p…
If you read further down the answer box you can see that it really does know the answer, it just doesn’t know which if the four figures to pick out.
So nice try Google; nearly there…..
But to be fair, Yahoo is no better. Its top answer proudly boasts that it is 53p which is also wrong. I knew that Royal Mail’s pricing in proportion was a little bit more complicated than the old flat rate but not that hard.
PS – The actual price is currently 54p
