Google vs. Live (Math as search string)
This is funny. Real funny. I don’t know who is to be blamed - Google or Live?
As most of you already know, both Google and Live are search engines and they are constantly evolving every day to serve better search results. One area that I really like about both of them is accepting “mathematical expressions” as search strings. In fact, they can also do conversion of units from one to another (like seconds to minutes)
But a friend of mine pointed me to some funny set of mis-interpretations of mathematical expressions as search input.
1. Search string = “2^4^2″
Google.com says 2^4^2 = 65536
Live.com says 2^4^2 = 256
2. Let’s try to get 65536 out of each search engine
To get the value 65536 you need to enter 2^2^2^2^2 in Live.com Search
To get the same value in Google.com it is enough to enter one “^2″ less = 2^2^2^2
After a little more research I figured out why this is happening - any guesses on what is causing this? any guesses on who is right or wrong here?
arunotorious said,
March 5, 2007 at 6:49 pm
this is simple buddy!!
an expression with exponents and no brackets is treated differently in Google and Live…meaning
x^x^x^x is treated as (x^(x^(x^x))) in Google
x^x^x^x is treated as (((x^x)^x)^x) in Live
but if you try providing the proper brackets then it should behave the same in both!
for example:
(2^(4^2)) = 65536 is same in both Google and Live
((2^4)^2) = 256 is same in both Google and Live
And there is no order of evaluation that is the standard when the operation is the same but the brackets are not provided.
Balaji said,
March 6, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Yeah right… 2 to the power 8 by google
and 2 to the power 4 and 16 to the power 2 by live… :)