Google Custom Search does not recognize special features

[Patrick van Staveren]

Ubuntu version: 8.10
Browser version: FF3 (likely affects any browser)
Affects: Online start page

Experienced google users know that the search engine recognizes quite a few special search phrases, such as the calculator, stock quotes and importantly, searching for "the answer to life the universe and everything". Many of these features are listed here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html

The custom search on the Ubuntu 8.10 default start page does not recognize these phrases. It would be quite useful if it did - I just discovered this casually searching for "showtimes near 60622" which retrieves movie showtimes for theaters in my area.

To reproduce, see the difference in results when searching for "1 + 2" on the Ubuntu start page vs. google.com. The latter shows the calculator result of this undeniably complicated arithmetic, whereas the prior does not recognize the search string.

I suppose the real question: is it possible to control this behavoir via the Custom Search API? Or would we need to ask Google to fix this? It might be more Google's bug ("missing feature") than Ubuntu's.

[Matthew Nuzum (newz)]

Hi, yes, this is one aspect to this problem, other aspects are that you don't get the shortcut links to things like gmail, google docs and etc. I've spoken with the people at Google and they do not currently have a solution to this. Our desire is to have the search results page be no different from the Ubuntu start page than for Google's search page. We're working on it but it's lower on the priority list.