This is extremely cool. Dave Winer mentioned today that Google has a calculator, and indeed it does. And a pretty decent one as well. The provided documentation gives you a good starting point, but I recommend some exploration.
The coolest thing for me is that it does unit conversion. I played around with some things and noticed it recognizes full names (kilograms), abbreviations (kg) and informal shortenings (kilos). Things with various possible values (e.g. gallons) default to the US values, but putting "uk" in front of gallons gives you the result in "Imperial gallons". Smart.
It doesn't do spell checking, so "33 kils in pounds" will not work, but that's a minor inconvenience. Actually, the fact that it doesn't work should be enough of a hint to check your spelling.
And all this from my (Mozilla) Googlebar. What will make it perfect is when I can type in "299.95 usd in euros". Let's hope it comes soon...
Update: It doesn't seem to be translated yet. "20 kilometros en millas" doesn't work yet, but doubtless they'll have it soon.
Posted by Dave at August 12, 2003 06:11 PM