Sony PSP Handheld Console Release Date Confused Google

Posted by Jason

April 11, 2005

The Sony PSP Release Date was March 24, 2005.

I know, that’s not new news. But it is a fact.

Never trust a cluster of logic based processors to do the work of a semantic PR firm. I was reading the official Google blog today and ran across a post on April 7th titled Just the Facts, Fast. It describes a new feature within Google results that will give a quick answer to a query that appears as a question.

For Example, let’s say your question is “Who is Bono?” (as examplified by the Google Blog). Type that in the Google search box, hit the Search button and Google spits out the answer “Paul David Hewson (born 10 May 1960, Dublin, Ireland), nicknamed Bono Vox, is the lead singer of the…” with a link to the source.

Sounds like a cool concept, right? Well, something that Google does well is index ALL information available. That includes past and slightly inaccurate pages. As an example, Google listed the word electronics with the query “Sony PSP release date“. The result? March 18th 2005–oops.

It appears that Google prioritized some older sites that first quoted the Playstation Portable to be released on the 18th, before Sony changed the official launch date to be about a week later on the 24th of March.

I’m sure there are plenty of bugs to be pulled out of this new application, and with some tuning it can be a pretty handy tool. It’s just too bad that their own example of how the system works gave us the wrong result.