Hacker News Reader

Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

This looks... erm ... neat. A "sophomore OpenGL term project" kind of neat. Wolfram on the other hand does the graphs right [0], which hardly surprising given their 20 years of head start.

On a more general note, this reminds me of old Microsoft's tactics. Google should really stick to the search, but instead they throw together something that mimics competitor's feature. Something that looks more featureful and which is free, but upon closer inspection is effectively a half-ass effort, because it's an entirely different domain that's not their specialty.

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28x*x%2By*y%29%2B3...

View on HN

My bet is that this is supported by Google as a "here's a neat hack" feature, not as a "this is a vital feature in our ongoing to-the-death competition with Wolfram Alpha".

"google should focus on search"

i keep hearing this. what makes you think they aren't? Google has a huge staff and equally huge revenues, i'm sure that if they thought search quality could be improved by throwing more engineers at it, that's what they would do.

as long as they employ a lot of engineers, why not have some them working on cool things like this? i see this more as a demonstration of webgl and non-flash tech than an attack on W|A

Yes. The definition of "search" seems to be changing.

Exactly, just because google is adding a bunch of cool free non obtrusive features doesn't mean that they are stifling innovation in their main field. Google is a large company with countless divisions, it isn't just one engineer who can only work on one project at a time or anything.

So if a user enters the following search query: Sqrt(xx+yy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

And gets a graph of the equation as the top result, are you claiming that this is a poor search experience? Are you claiming that this is a bad result?

If not, how is this feature not an improvement to search? How is this not "sticking to search"?

Note - I was not involved in any way with this feature, or with search quality in general

I dunno. It's pretty, and it's good enough if you just want to gauge the overall shape of the curve, which is all I need most of the time.

Well, if i want a quick inspection this wins because i can rotate it without having to download other stuff.

What's so wrong about this representation? looks fine to me.

[0] looks identical over the same ranges of x,y,z. http://goo.gl/pTrLh

Who cares if it's trivial? It's functional, fast, convenient and doesn't require a bunch of cruft. Kinda damages your quasi-rant to find out that you simply... didn't compare the graphs over the same interval. I don't know why every small feature that Google adds is either apparently out of fear of someone who's hardly a competitor or is proof that Google is the next Microsoft (which is a useless statement anyway).

This all just reminds me how truly sad HN's markup is. I can't even escape the multiplication in the query for Google to get it to render properly (I replaced it with a Goo.gl link).

I think you can escape the asterisk by indenting the line with two spaces:

  text with * signs that doesn't get italicized *

Or followed with a space. * this * vs. this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com