September 05, 2003

Google Functionality Marches On

Posted by Kieran

There’s an old law of software development that says every application expands to the point where it can read mail. A little-known corollary is that Google can always do more than you think.

For example, try searching for expressions like 213 * 718, or 76 kilos in pounds, or even (G * mass of Earth) / (radius of Earth^2). Amazing. Wait till Brad DeLong hears about it.

Update: Naturally, the google calculator also knows the answer to life, the universe and everything. (Hat tip: Geek Notes.)

Posted on September 5, 2003 06:18 AM UTC
Comments

Kieran, did you happen to catch the Washington Post article on the Google calculator a few weeks back? If not, check it out.

Posted by Robert Tagorda · September 5, 2003 07:03 AM

Cool.

It seems to know about all sorts of archaic weights and measures too: cubits, pennyweights and the like!

“1 Healy in Instapundits” it rejected for some reason (probably the number is too large to compute).

Posted by Chris · September 5, 2003 08:22 AM

Merely the latest manifestation of the eternal return of the command-line interface.

Which is probably a good thing.

Posted by bad Jim · September 5, 2003 10:03 AM

Brad already does.

Posted by Barry · September 5, 2003 12:13 PM

That’s wierd - when I posted, there were no other comments. However, my comment is listed after several others. Maybe I was on a slow connection :)

Posted by Barry · September 5, 2003 04:21 PM

It has to be a very slow connection for it to take two to five hours to post.

Posted by Kristjan Wager · September 5, 2003 04:47 PM

When I saw your headline “Google Functionality Marches On”, I was expecting to read a post about Cthuugle

Posted by Jeremy Osner · September 5, 2003 05:07 PM

This is SO COOL!

Posted by Robert Schwartz · September 5, 2003 05:28 PM

What’s that line about every large C program eventually containing a buggy implementation of Common Lisp?

I want to be able to pipe Google search-results to grep, and I want it now.

Posted by Tom · September 5, 2003 10:15 PM

What was disappointing about what Google found was that its identification of “42” as “the answer to life, the universe, and everything” stopped at Doug Adams’ cryptic mention of this… when Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) arrived at this answer approximately a century and a half ago. See Gardner’s “The Annotated Snark” for details (noting the significance of the number 42 recurring so frequently in Carroll’s writing — it’s the number the Butcher comes up with as the answer (to what?) in their walk together in the Snark, the height the King of Hearts ascribes to Alice in the Wonderland trial, etc.).

Dodgson ahead of the game again (and a likely pedophile to boot!).

Posted by Steady Eddie · September 5, 2003 10:42 PM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.