Mountain View, California — For students and lovers of everything maths who are always busy with crunching complicated numbers, now merely need to type in a function directly into the Google search bar, as the search engine giant recently added some brilliant new functionality to the calculator built into its search engine: a full graphing calculator implementation, complete with multi-coloured output, the company announced in a blog post.
Despite the company’s recent house-cleaning process, which has witnessed several projects — including the Google Labs incubator system being shut down in order to better focus on the core business of advertising, engineers at the company are still given time to work on projects they love.
Now, as you type in a function — for example: sin(x) — the first search result will be an interactive graph allowing users to explore different related values for x and y, or shortly once it is rolled out to all users over the coming days.
Google Engineer, Adi Avidor and maths enthusiast, on the company blog described the mathematical wonders that the Google calculator can perform — the concealed engine that empowers you to type “1+2” or “333 USD in GBP” into Google’s search engine and obtain a calculated solution besides your search results — now supports graphing as well.
“I still remember the day when my friend Yossi came to school and showed off his brand new graphing calculator,” Avidor explains. “I was amazed by how easy it was to plot complicated functions – meanwhile, the rest of us were still drawing them by hand on graph paper.”
Here is an example of what you could see:
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In fact, Google’s search bar has long been appeared pretty friendly to the mathematically inclined — or challenged. The calculator feature, which has existed for several years, empowers users to type in mathematical equations — ranging from the simple to the complex — for real-time answers.
Users can also calculate multiple functions by separating them with commas. The new feature is available in most browsers and “covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions,” writes Google engineer Adi Avidor.
“I hope students and math lovers around the world find this experience as magical as I found the graphing calculator so long ago. You can also zoom in and out and pan across the plane to examine the function in more detail,” Avidor wrote.
Furthermore, users can also derive answers to calculation problems with numerical answers, for example the number of seconds in a year. Other complex number-based reference tools include unit conversion, for example 75 centimeters in inches, and public data, for example the population of San Francisco.
Google has been pretty helpful as a calculator in the past, particularly with Chrome’s omnibox. The company’s new tool joins Wolfram Alpha, the self-described “computational knowledge engine” that was released two years ago, in helping users plot mathematical functions.
It is an impressive addition to Google’s search offerings, but one that is something more of a toy than a tool. So, when you are using the web, it is much easier than opening up your computer’s calculator application. Nevertheless, those with a mathematical fondness may want to head on over to the Google home page and give it a go.