Google Squared Declares Current Russian President Medvedev Dead

I guess I am just too conservative but for some reason I am rarely even inclined to test and review the new arrivals to the search engines world as I am kind of certain that I will stick to classic and minimalist Google Search for some more time – at least while I am pretty happy with the results I get.

Yet of course it is impossible not to notice the entire buzz around Microsoft’s Bing or Google Squared that is now available to the public as well. And while I did not really intend to go test the new approach Google offers to search, I could not ignore one fact that one Russian online publication discovered about Google Squared: it has just declared the president Medvedev dead.

Honestly, this is more than surprising given that I have just watched evening news and Medvedev looked quite healthy to me – despite of the fact that he must be dead for a couple of weeks now. Yet Google Squared thinks otherwise.

You must already be aware that upon receiving a search request from a user, Google Squared provides search results in an interactive table so when you search for people you get a table with various columns hosting their names, photos, dates of birth and death, and other relevant information.

The surprising fact is that when you search for “President of the Russian Federation”, you will see Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev in the search results and both Yeltsin and Medvedev have a date in the “died” column – even though Medvedev is alive and well. According to Googl Squared, Medvedev presumably died on the 20^th of May when a famous Russian actor actually died so the search engine grabbed the mistake from all the publication that covered the actor’s death along with the fact that Medvedev commiserated on his death – but it does not feel better because we know where the mistake is from.

In addition to that, Google Squared also added Viktor Chernomyrdin to the list of presidents though he only was our prime minister for a while and some movie called “5 November 1996″ which does not seem to be human at all.

Now I know that Google Squared is still a young product in beta but still it feels somewhat terrifying to know that anyone can be declared dead this easily. So even if you are willing to play with Google Squared, I would not trust everything I see in the table – at least for now. After all, leaving an entire country without a president so easily does not seem to be the most responsible approach of all.

Via (in Russian)