No Google, that is not how you convert meters into feet.

Pixel of Life@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 62 points –
14

Doesn't work when you don't type it out correctly. It's interpreting the "m" as million and "in" as inches. Use "m to ft" to get it every time

There's no correct and incorrect here. The help page (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/3284611) doesn't even mention which word you should use, and it of course depends on the language you use. As a German speaker, I naturally use "in", and that always worked for me (I use this a lot), except for this example.

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Google did exactly what you told you to do.

DDG has always been pretty good at unit conversion. Sadly, they no longer respect term exclusions in their searches. Had to go back to the G. :(

It seems the unit was changed, look below the numbers

But it wasn't. I get the same result for this exact query. It seems to be like explained in another answer: Google interprets the "m" as million and the "in" as inch, so it gives you just some conversion for 17 million inches. It's a bit random here how Google interprets things. "17.21 m in" (that one really could mean 17 million inches) is correctly taken as a meter-inch conversion, while "17.21m in" does a conversion from 17.21 meters to kilometers (where are they coming from?).