Google Search now gives you fun facts, unfortunately doesn’t work too well

Google announced today that Google Search will now be able to give you fun facts about pretty much anything, ranging from dogs to cucumbers. So I tried it and the results were a bit disappointing.

It’s true that Google Search has come a long way: what started out as a search engine running on the Stanford University servers can now give you all sorts of information, ranging from recipes to where your nearest polling station is. Well, the company has decided to add more fun to it by making it much easier to find random facts and trivia.

For instance, did you know that a cat can’t chew big pieces of food because their jaw can’t move sideways? Or that dogs have three eyelids to help protect and keep their eyes from drying out? And for all the veggie-lovers out there, did you know that the inner temperature of a cucumber can be up to 20 degrees cooler than the outside air?

According to Google, these are some of the fun facts that you can get on Google Search, and apparently, if you refresh the page, Google will come up with another random fun fact for you. So I gave it a try, and some very simple ones do work, but others, not so much.

Phrases that Google uses as examples like “Dogs fun facts” or “Cucumber fun facts” do work well. At the top of the page, you will see a Google card with a random fact, which will change when you refresh the page. However, when I tried things like “Android fun facts,” “Google fun facts,” or “Harry Potter fun facts,” it simply gave me a preview of a select website and did not change even when I refreshed the page.

It looks like your query has to be pretty general for this to work. For example, while “Cats fun facts” works perfectly, “British shorthair fun facts” does not. Although I’m not sure if this will make you the “reigning champ at trivia” as Google claims, it certainly is a fun addition to your search experience.