By Alan Connor
Publication Date: 2026-02-02 12:04:00
I regret to announce that a handy sense-check tool is now no longer available. I was recently checking a clue (“Leftmost colour on the French flag”) in our addictive new Mini series. (There’s a new one every day: tell your cryptic-sceptical friends; it might bring them our way.) I typed “french flag” into Google.
In, say, 2020, it was possible to type “spotted hyena diet” and clock where the Featured Snippet was taken from. I was initially sceptical but if it was from, say, Britannica, one more click would confirm that the luckless gazelles had been clued accurately. More often than not, it was indeed from a reputable source and the rest of the time, the information was usually correct, just requiring a further bit of searching to find a Britannica, a Collins, or, best of all, a Guardian.
Now, it behaves differently. Rather than sending you toward a likely helpful resource, it attempts to synthesise a bunch of them and it’s much harder to tell where the components…
