Google spits out results for Book of Genesis and the band Genesis when searching for Sega's Mega Drive because it's trying to be clever

Google search result for book of megadrive with Genesis results showing up incorrectly
(Image credit: Google)

A very specific quirk, but an entertaining one: Google spits out results related to the Book of Genesis from Wikipedia and the website of The Holy See and the band Genesis when you search for some terms related to Sega's Mega Drive console. 

It looks like Google's picked up on the fact that Sega's Mega Drive videogame console from the late '80s was named the Sega Genesis in North America, and uses the terms Mega Drive and Genesis interchangeably for results. However, as Twitter user CaptainBalkon found out, it gets its Genesises (Genesus?) confused.

If you search for the specific term, "Book of Megadrive" (Megadrive needs to be all one word, weirdly), you end up with the Wikipedia page for the Book of Genesis on the first page, and The Holy See's webpage for the holy text. Though as other users have experimented with the phenomena, you can get it to spit out all sorts of interesting results.

The search engine will spit out the song 'I Can't Dance' by Genesis if you enter Megadrive dance as a search term.

Lord knows Google results are never perfect, but this peculiar quirk is particularly funny as it's clearly an effort by Google to make its search engine more useful to the user gone haywire. Does make you wonder if Google will actually fix this one, it's extremely specific and not really an issue, or if it'll continue to spread the good word to unsuspecting Sonic fans.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

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