4 ms·
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 t
by huhtenberg 15y ago
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*cos%28sqrt%28x*x%2By*y%29%29%2B5 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28x*x%2By*y%29%2B3...
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoI 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.
- zorked 15y agoMy 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".
- drivebyacct2 15y ago[0] looks identical over the same ranges of x,y,z. http://goo.gl/pTrLh 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).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- WiseWeasel 15y agoI think you can escape the asterisk by indenting the line with two spaces: text with * signs that doesn't get italicized *
- prodigal_erik 15y agoOr followed with a space. * this * vs. this
- the_cat_kittles 15y agoWell, if i want a quick inspection this wins because i can rotate it without having to download other stuff.
- muyuu 15y agoWhat's so wrong about this representation? looks fine to me.
- robertbobmiller 15y agoLooks completely fine me to!
- notatoad 15y ago"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
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoYes. The definition of "search" seems to be changing.
- razorstorm 15y agoExactly, 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.
- mvgoogler 15y agoSo 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