I was trying to open Google Hangouts on my iPhone to verify my Google Voice number. The app on my iPhone asked me to log in and then once I gave my password, I got an error message to the effect that it was unable to add the account. The app seemed stuck in a loop so I searched for “Hangouts iphone can’t add account”

This question has a simple answer: Google Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat and Google Meet. See, for example, “The latest on Google Hangouts and the upgrade to Google Chat” at blog.google and “Google puts an end to Google Hangouts once and for all” from Techcrunch.com.

However, when I searched for information with search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, they have at the top of their results a post on the Apple “Ask Different” Stack Exchange (apple.stackexchange.com StackExchange is a collection of topical question and answer sites that allow members to vote on answers. The name is a play on Stock Exchange and the name of one if its first sites, stackoverflow.com that is targeted for programmers.)

What is surprising and frustrating about this is that the preview text of some of the search engines comes from a downvoted answer from 2014. Answers with a negative rating should generally be ignored because they’re considered wrong or unreliable but that is what the search engines present as the answer. None of the answers are current to the January 2023 Hangouts end date. I learned that the transition was announced years ago but the information is drowned in the search results by a lot of obsolete information.

This is a stark example of a weakness of search engines: Once a piece of information is resolved as the highest ranked answer, it is very difficult for it to be replaced, even if it’s wrong. Search engine autocomplete indices are difficult to update and in this case, the auto-completes for a Hangouts search has been captured by ancient history. Typing “google hangouts” in the search box gives autocompletes that appear to indicate that Hangouts is still available.

Fortunately, in this case, the problem could be resolved with an edit to the Apple Stack Exchange question to include a currently valid answer. (I don’t have the reputation points to edit the question nor Apple expertise to get them.)