WHY DOESN'T GOOGLE WANT TO TELL ME WHAT DAY IT IS?
March 3, 2010 10:42 PM   Subscribe

Wikipedia gives me the answer I would expect when I enter "today". Wolfram|Alpha also comes up with the right answer. With Yahoo, I don't even have to ask. How is it that after millions and billions and trillions of dollars in market capitalization, Google gets this wrong?

Sometimes I'm just not sure what date it is, what day it is, the kind of info you can easily get from the top of today's newspaper. There has got to be some conspiracy afoot which prevents the all-powerful Google search engine from just telling me what damn day it is. I don't want to hear about a "Google Hack" that I'd need to memorize to trick it into telling me the date. Why can't it just tell me what day it is when I ask in simple terms? Pls discuss.
posted by shipbreaker to Technology (12 answers total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: this is kind of chatfilter -- mathowie

 
...because presumably, on a computer, your system clock will do the job?
posted by MadamM at 10:43 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


For what it's' worth, I just tried this, and Wolfram Alpha gave me the correct local date, while Wikipedia gave me tomorrow's date.
posted by lukemeister at 10:50 PM on March 3, 2010


This seems awfully chatfilter.
posted by mollymayhem at 10:51 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Also, iGoogle gives the date, time, and a calendar of this month.
posted by lukemeister at 10:52 PM on March 3, 2010


I'm with mollymayhem...what kind of an answer are you looking for? A Google employee could probably tell you the exact reason, but unless one of them is on MeFi, and happens to be in the right department and know exactly what the reason is for this, or can easily ask someone who does know, I'm guessing you won't get the real answer...unless I misunderstand what you are looking for. You might be better off trying to contact Google about it, if you want to really know what is up, or if you want it changed...which it sounds like you do?
posted by dubitable at 10:55 PM on March 3, 2010


Because that's not how Google works. It's also not how Bing, Yahoo Search, ask.com, or AltaVista work.

You want today's date, go to Yahoo.com and see for yourself.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:56 PM on March 3, 2010


Google doesn't think about today's date because they're creating the future.
posted by lukemeister at 10:59 PM on March 3, 2010 [5 favorites]


Because you haven't selected that option. Just go to that link and click "Subscribe." Now, a search for "today's date" will always return the date and local time.
posted by koeselitz at 11:09 PM on March 3, 2010


If I type "time chicago" it tells me. Yes, I figured this out by reading the docs. Just plain "time" also seems to work.
posted by sbutler at 11:11 PM on March 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Haha. Never mind, doesn't have the date. Just the time :)
posted by sbutler at 11:17 PM on March 3, 2010


Also, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of search engines. Google isn't getting anything "wrong." Google is getting it right. You're looking for a nonstandard search result, and nonstandard search results screw up standard search results.

Let's say I'm doing a linguistic project relating to how many times the word "today" has been used on the web in the past year. (Yes, this is a plausible project.) If a search for "today" brings up all kinds of gobbledy-gook about today's date and time, rather than returning what it's supposed to - a simple listing of every use of the word "today" in every indexed page - then those results are wildly skewed. You'll notice that Google is pretty careful to make its "smart searches" include a level of complexity, so that natural-language searches like that aren't utterly destroyed like they are on Wolfram and Bing.

I know that it might seem as though "smart search" means "guess exactly what I want and give me that, damnit!" – but it doesn't. Google will not hand you everything on a platter. This may seem odd to you, but that's the very reason why it's powerful; it can handle a complex logistical natural-language search in ways that Bing, Wolfram, and other search engines simply can't.

But, yes: the answer to this question is probably buy a calendar.
posted by koeselitz at 11:19 PM on March 3, 2010 [4 favorites]


Googling the word date, the 3rd result down is "see results for today's date" and the first link there is todaysdate.com, which I think is an extremely easy to remember URL if you really can't mouse over or click on your system clock, which takes less effort than typing a query into Google. The site even detects your time zone.

If you have a custom HTML home page on your own server like I do, you can even put in a snippet of Javascript to display today's date.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:47 PM on March 3, 2010


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