[teamonkey]

If you ask Google "What is the capital city of the country that has the 15th highest average rainfall in the world?" then you don't get a straight answer.

This software should be able to look up rainfall data from Stephan Wolfram's Bumper Book of Trivia, work out average rainfall for each country, work out which country has the 15th-highest rainfall from that result, then look up the capital city for that country.

All determinable facts with a straight answer; you should simply get the name of the city as a result.

[russell]

I tried the query and the top of the list is the parent comment. (Google seems to be paying close attention to HN.) The second was an article about Uruguay which said it was colonized from Spain in the 15th century. Google replied with any old 15th. (The article is actually wrong. It was settled in 1536.)

The parent posting is correct. Google is particularly poor at complex questions, especially if you aren't sure about the exact phrasing. I have had several queries in the past couple of weeks where I have had to spend 30 to 90 minutes trying to get the right set of terms to return the right set of documents to look at. This is particularly true if the name of the product is a common English word.