Potsie on Tumblr

I still recall the day when my friend Yossi came to school and showed off his brand new graphing calculator. I was stunned by how easy it was to plot complicated functions — meanwhile, the rest of us were still drawing them by hand on graph paper.

Today, I’m hoping to share that magical feeling with students around the world, with the introduction of graphing functionality on Google. Now you can plot mathematical functions right on the search result page. Just type in a function and you’ll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page.

You can zoom in and out and pan across the plane to explore the function in more detail. You can also draw multiple functions by separating them with commas. This feature covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, logarithmic and their compositions, and is available in modern browsers.

I hope students and math lovers around the world find this experience as magical as I found the graphing calculator so long ago.

Posted by Adi Avidor, Google Engineer and Math Lover

Do you remember the dot-com bubble? In the early days of the information super-highway, VCs and entrepreneurs alike were more concerned about the number of page views than they were about revenue.

Back then, it was all about “eyeballs.”

But as the bubble burst entrepreneurs realized that eyeballs don’t pay the rent and they had to get back to business basics. You know, generate good ole fashion revenue.

Now with the flurry of activity in social media, we’re seeing a similar situation – metrics such as “engagement” are measured and presented as a proxy for conversions & revenue. Is engagement the new ‘eyeballs’? Are we simply repeating the same mistakes?

Check out our new infographic to follow the evolution of web analytics – from “hits” to “engagement” to Conversions.

Click the graphic for a larger view.

 

  shareshare

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