General suggestions
- Stay within unit systems. If I search for rod= or acre, give the answer in feet or square feet, not meters or square meters. If I search for 1 acre / 1 mile, say 8.25 feet instead of 2.5146 meters.
- Output in km/h rather than m/s if the inputs are in terms of kilometers and hours or days. 800 km / 8 hours should be 100 km/h (rather than 27.77777778 m/s), but 3/5 c and 10 m / 3 s should be in m/s.
- Parse 8 h as "8 hours", not "8 times Planck's constant". Not everyone knows what Planck's constant is or that it is represented by "h". I noticed this problem while searching for 800 km / 8 h. Strangely, 800 km / 100 km/h works as I would expect.
- Never round aggressively. Round without explanation once (one baker's dozen in dozens), and you lose my trust whenever you output an integer (1 acre in square feet) unless I figure out your rule for when to round.
Error-handling
- Floating-point arithmetic errors (1 / 0, 2 ^ 2000) should be displayed by default. Currently, they cause the calculator line to not appear, as if the calculator hadn't feature been triggered at all.
- Unit errors should be displayed by default. Examples: 1 acre in feet, 1 meter + 2 seconds, cube root of a square mile.
- There should be a way to see syntax errors so I'm not left in the dark when I make an error in my input and only get search results. It would make sense to use = at the end of a search for this, since = already causes questionable calculations like 1 feet= or 8 mile= and useless calculations like 6 cm= to be displayed.
New features
This is my second post about Google Calculator. My first was
Units in Google Calculator.
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on Tuesday, August 19th, 2003 at 3:40 am and is filed under Google, User Interfaces.
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August 19th, 2003 at 5:13 am
“Output in km/h rather than m/s if the inputs are in terms of kilometers and hours or days.”
Or output BOTH.
August 20th, 2003 at 7:30 pm
I think that it should interpret “8h” as 8 hours and “8*h” as 8 times Plank’s constant.
P.S. I see you’re using my phat MT:Powered Icon. Wanna exchange links? I already gave you one.
August 22nd, 2003 at 11:27 am
The rounding is partly due to how you expressed the problem:
“one baker’s dozen in dozens” gives “one dozen”
“1 baker’s dozen in dozens” gives “1.08333333 dozens”
Similarly: “2+2” gives “4”, while “two plus two” gives “four”.