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Why doesn't Arnold Schwarznegger show up in this query on Google? (google.com)
85 points by throwaway29303 on Nov 26, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 48 comments


Hi, I work at Google but don't work in Search currently. It looks like poor Mr Schwarzenegger has exposed some bug in the knowledge graph (searching for just [arnold schwarzenegger] in en-US shows a knowledge panel for the actor's son, oops; searching for the son does the right thing). Thank you, I've reported it.


Interestingly he shows up fine for "governors of california" but not for any movies or anything you'd expect his headshot to appear on.


Maybe Google knew his character in Terminator was a robot, so the anti-robot filter kicked him out of the cast. Sounds like a case of robophobia to me! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14HIPF0K8fY

>But I read in Esqwired Magazine that some robots are hard-wired to be robosexual!


It's easy to forget to include him as allowed in your robots.txt


Hey slb, I think we seriously need some portals to report spam websites directly to someone at Google, AI spam is already taking over the SERPs nowadays, very very annoying and bad experience, I know the normal interface besides each result position but seems Google never care about such reports...


There's "Feedback" link for both the search results and the Knowledge Panel. I doubt that a large volume of similarly targeted feedback would go unnoticed (why would they keep this feature then?).



Could it be possibly because of some badly written word filter? I’m hinting at the second part of his last name. The extra “g” is there because that’s how it’s spelled in German language, and yes, the translation is what you would guess.


Schwarz is black?

Google says:

From Schwarzenegg +‎ -er, literally “someone from Schwarzenegg”, referring to either of two places in Switzerland and Austria, from schwarz (“black”) +‎ Egg (“ridge”), cognate with Ecke.


While true, it’s also true that “neger” is the German word for “negro” and the last time I was in Bavaria also a certain type of dark chocolate covered donut. I’m not sure if the word is considered outmoded or politically incorrect as it is in English.


I can assure you that it is the German equivalent of the N-word in most ways, using it is frowned upon and perceived as a racial slur (although this hasn't been the case few decades below still). But people who use it nowadays are either very old or racists.

The egg in Arnolds name is probably a Styrian-Austrian dialect variation of "Eck" which translates to "corner". In Austria there are many places ending in this egg (sometimes also only with a single "g").

So his literal name might describe somebody coming from a place called "Schwarzenegg". And Schwarzenegg would be literally "Black-Corner".


I thought it was a somewhat common name for a Coke/beer mix. Is that a regional thing? Or maybe I just accidentally hung out with lots of old and/or racist Germans


Definitely somewhat racist.


>I’m not sure if the word is considered outmoded or politically incorrect as it is in English.

It is. Very much so. It's the equivalent to the US "n-word".


He was on Letterman in the 1980s and said his name means “black plowman”.


I tried the query in other search engines:

- Bing shows a similar carousel as Google at the top but here Arnold is the first image.

- DuckDuckGo doesn't show a direct answer. First results are IMDb and Wikipedia.

- Kagi is similar to DuckDuckGo, no direkt answer, IMDb and Wikipedia first. Where it gets interesting is the third result. It is a link to a Google query for the phrase: "Why doesn't Arnold Schwarzenegger show up in this query on Google?"



Are IMDb and Wikipedia not appropriate direct answers?


What GP means is that it's not inline, presented as a carousel or info-box (usually with a source link) instead of as a normal search result.


Arnold seems to be totally missing.

Not in Kindergarten Cop either.

Last Action Hero has T-1000 but not Arnold.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cast+of+last+action+hero


If you search for arnold schwarzenegger, there are results about him, but there is no infobox. So it seems he is gone from the "clever parts" of search, but not from normal results. Amusingly, one time I searched for arnold scharzenegger I got an infobox about his son Patrick Arnold Shriver Schwarzenegger, but this was once-only thing, I did save a screenshot to prove it though.


I get the same thing. I think that's the issue, Google is confusing the two. If you click the arrow on the infobox next to 'Movies and TV shows' it searches with the keywords 'patrick schwarzenegger movies and tv shows' but if you change it to 'arnold schwarzenegger movies and tv shows' you still get movies and TV shows for Patrick.

I think it's because Patrick Schwarzenegger has been in some stuff recently. Google Search tries to predicatively rank content based on recent popularity but just screws it up most of the time. I run into this same issue frequently with Google Search now which is one of the many reasons why I switched to DDG as my primary search engine. Google search results have just become unusably poor.


still shows up when you google "governator"


Also if you search for "governors of california" which surprised me, since he's invisible just about everywhere else.


My initial guess is that a crude pattern match for the n word also filters his surname.


Maybe the ML powering google is experiencing a Scunthorpe hiccup


Very interesting especially since he was the leading role in that movie.


He doesn’t appear for any of his movies when searching for the cast, it’s not just Terminator 2.


Works for me: https://imgur.com/a/2cEuYyS

Searching from Belgium. Can it be region or language related?


This is what I get: https://imgur.com/a/dusADjq

Picture of Schwarznegger under "Robert Winley" for some reason, but that's it.

Also if you scroll down a bit more it shows not just Edward Furlong as John Connor, but also Dalton Abbott, Michael Edwards, and Marius Clarén.

Abbott and Edwards are "Old John Connor" and "Infant John Connor" on imdb, and Marius Clarén is the guy who does the voice of Connor in the German dub. I guess it's "correct" for some value of "correct", but also not really.

tl;dr: don't trust these google instant preview thingies it seems.


Not showing him as cast of terminator 2, his most successful movie, is bad, but not showing him as cast of CONAN THE BARBARIAN -the 1982 movie- is worst!!¡



Jim Carey is replaced with Paul Giamatti too.


FYI many of these top results are Manually curated / created. I'd wager that to be the reason.


And a manual curator would omit arnie for what reason?


If it's truly manual it could simply be a mistake.


For all Schwarzenegger movies?


If someone accidentally deleted the Schwarzenegger table in a database, I would expect all movies to no longer reference him.


Also Michael Biehn is listed, but he wasn't in the sequel; he was only in the original.


I did the same search for 1 and 3 and he doesn’t show up there either.


Interesting! Brave search has Schwarznegger as the first cast member


His name is Schwarzenegger, please


Clearly Google is the source of sky net


How about EU-issued "right to be forgotten"? Is it possible that Arnie requested being removed from all the search results?


CCPA Sounds right - even searching for his name results in a different header of his son Patrick https://www.google.com/search?q=arnold+schwarzenegger


He's missing from seemingly any search results about movies when query string is "cast of <MOVIE>"

But he's there when searching "Mr Olympia 1970s" : https://www.google.com/search?q=mr+olympia+1970s

So maybe not RTBF.


Interesting. May be a bug related to the schema markup

Same issue happens for a search of “the terminator cast”


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I don't think he wants to type or search for racist words, he just wants search engines to actually show accurate relevant search results again. The fact their algorithm probably identified a famous actor as worth completely erasing from search results should worry you, its such a big and obvious mistake, think about all the small and non-obvious mistakes it's probably making right now.




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