farblog, by Malcolm Rowe

The quickest calculator

Matt Cutts points out — right at the bottom of this post — a nice tip that I hadn’t seen before: the auto-suggest on Firefox’s Google search box (or the IE Google toolbar) will show you results from the Google calculator (the thing that pops up if you search for terms that look like unit conversions or equations, like “1 + 1” or “21 c in f”).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work for my favourite equation:

A screenshot showing the autosuggest dropdown box in a Firefox window. The text entered in the box reads “e ^ (i * pi) + 1”. The first result reads “nannan i U.S. dollars”.
ℯ iπ + 1 equals what?

(You get the same error whenever the calculator would give a zero result. Bug filed.)

Posted at 15:46:47 BST on 15th October 2007.