On Thursday evening Chris Ingraham, a journalist with 100k followers on Twitter, shared a screenshot of the now-famous “african country that starts with k” Google Quick Answer, which quickly went viral, garnering over 82k likes and 3 million views as of the time of this writing on Monday morning:
Preceden’s designer, Milan, saw it on his feed and shared it with me on Friday morning, which I first saw when I loaded Twitter on my phone at the gym that morning.
I was like alright, here we go again. I’ll reply and explain what’s going on so anyone seeing the screenshot has some context:
And then my notifications started exploding with… shall we say… mixed reactions.
Some screenshots for posterity… 🤣
And the tweet that inspired the header image on this post:
I’m sitting there at the gym and just like… what is going on…
BoingBoing wound up writing an article about the incident:
I’ll note that Emergent Mind is not abandoned, for what it’s worth. Just on a long pause 😀.
In retrospect, in my original response to Chris I should have given more context, and not just assume people would click through and read the blog post. Or maybe I should not have responded at all, though I’m glad I was able to provide context, even if it resulted in some mean tweets against me, hah.
I also stand by my decision to keep that Emergent Mind page online. It’s a harmless and obviously incorrect answer that has now become the canonical example of how Google quick answers can get things wrong. Identifying and eliminating incorrect Quick Answers is no doubt hard to do at scale, but I hope this snippet and others like it contribute to Google addressing accuracy issues in time.
Sometime tells me this won’t be the last time this goes viral…
Matt Mazur 
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