If you're wondering what former President Barack Obama is doing nowadays, you might want to ask Google Home.
According to the search engine's new "home assistant," Obama is keeping busy by planning a coup d'etat of the United States government. Oh, and he's getting help with it from the "Communist Chinese."
That answer, along with a few other strange ones, was discovered last weekend when BBC reporter Rory Cellan-Jones and others asked the Google device some questions about Obama, American presidents and Republicans in Washington.
The answers from the voice-activated speaker were a bit surprising, even to the folks at Google.
According to a Google search for “Were any American presidents members of the Ku Klux Klan,” Google Home said there were four U.S. presidents who were Klan members. However, there is no evidence that any of the men – Harry Truman, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding – were ever Klansmen.
Danny Sullivan, a founding editor at Search Engine Land.com, asked if Republicans are fascists. You bet, Google replied, Republicans are the same as Nazis.
Cellan-Jones asked Google why he was getting such responses in the “Featured Snippet” box – a box that pops up at the top of the page after you make a query of Google and features a basic answer to the question asked.
"Featured snippets in search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites," the company said in answer to Cellan-Jones’ question.
"Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content. When we are alerted to a featured snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance.”
In other words, the answers that Google chose to give to those questions came from random sources, not necessarily unbiased, chosen by the company's algorithm. Answers from far-right and far-left websites were pulled by the search and used in answering the questions.
Here’s what the answer to the Obama question sounded like:
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