Stefan on Google’s new calculator feature, and the (perhaps confusing) future of the “one-box” features:
“…what google is now losing (and the bane of all command line interfaces) is any kind of discoverability for all these new functions. I’ll never remember half those features, because there are few visual cues to tell me they’re there, and I can’t be arsed to remember anything. If I could remember stuff, I wouldn’t need sites like google.”
Not unusually, I’m not sure I agree with him. Google’s “one-box” features (generally) look for expressions or formats of information in your query that mean you’re trying to complete a very defined task – like an address, or a mathematical expression. They’re not trying to bind you into the syntax of a programming language or, indeed in many cases leave you with just the returned output of that features – extending (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth^2) = 9.82085555 m / s into Search for documents containing the terms (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth ^ 2); as featured on Google.com as an example for instance.
This is a smart (and getting smarter) conversational interface – if you know the language, the syntax of the query that will drop you right next to the answer – it fullfils it. If not, then Google will probably do it’s damnest to guess.
Not much like a unix shell.
Petafloptimism 
Like I said at the beginning, I wasn’t being entirely serious. It was more an expression of my thought process…
1. Google doing lots of ‘neat’ things that aren’t core, and creating functionality that makes it like a portal. Whence Googlemail?
(or does groups count?)
2. I saw the calculator, and I thought, ‘neat’, but then remembered that like all the other neat things that google have done, I’d never remember to carry on using it. Maybe my retention is unusually weak.
And then it felt like the first time I sat down at dumb terminal and stared at the prompt. I *know* this machine can do lots of things, but how do I find out what they are, and why do I feel so stupid in the meantime?