Stop what you are doing and Ask Google Assistant 'How many legs does a horse have'

Reading time icon 2 min. read


Readers help support MSPoweruser. When you make a purchase using links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Tooltip Icon

Read the affiliate disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser effortlessly and without spending any money. Read more

In a rather funny incident, Google somehow managed to botch up the number of legs a horse have. It’s not a unique fact that a horse has 4 legs but Google thinks otherwise. A random search on Google revealed the issue with the search engine and is now being shared online.

At the time of writing this article, if someone went on Google and searched the phrase “How many legs does a horse have”, Google replies 6. The result is the same if you ask Google Assistant. The reason for this is the fact that Google’s Algorithm accidentally ranked a riddle about horses on Wikipedia and is using it as a reference to provide answers. The riddle which goes something like:

All horses have even number of legs.
All horses have two legs at the back
They also have fore legs at the front
That makes it a total of six legs
But six is an odd number of legs for a horse to have
Since infinity is the only number that is odd and even, all horses have infinite legs!!

The issue is not limited to Google as Cortana seems to think a horse has 9 legs, thanks to another riddle posted on the same Wikipedia page. To our surprise, Siri doesn’t make the same mistake and is right about the number of legs a horse have.

This goes to show how a single change can break any virtual assistant easily. We don’t have any official statement from Microsoft or Google about the issue but we do hope it gets fixed soon. In the meantime, you can have fun fooling the virtual assistants.

More about the topics: Apple Siri, Cortana, google, google assistant