Implementing % button, Google chose an approach which is more mathematically sensible but arguably less obvious to users. For Google, 10% just an alias for 0.1. This means that if you want to calculate how much a dress with a price of $299 costs with a 20% discount, type in
299 + 299 × 20%
Perhaps, this is exactly how you think % should work.
Microsoft, however, chose to make “%” key more user-friendly, perhaps sacrificing some consistency. Windows calculator tries to use the last computed value as “the whole”. Therefore,
299 - 20%
will give you how much a $299 dress costs with 20% discount, and
299 + 5% - 20%
will help you calculate 5% tax before applying the discount.
which I think it is exactly how I would expect it to work: If I ask a question, I expect the system to guess what I really want to know and give me an answer.
500 + 1% typed right in calculator displays "500 + 1% = 500.01" in the calculator.
500 + 1% typed in the search box displays "500 + 1% = 505" in the calculator too.
It's probably due to the search result being returned by some server at Google while the other one is computed locally through some client-side JS logic. I think they'll notice and unify the behavior at some point.
I just tested it and the percent key in the Google calculator doesn't work like the one described in the linked article. It really just divides by 100.
Relevant post by Raymond Chen:
“How does the [Windows] calculator percent key work?”
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/01/10/70474...
Implementing % button, Google chose an approach which is more mathematically sensible but arguably less obvious to users. For Google, 10% just an alias for 0.1. This means that if you want to calculate how much a dress with a price of $299 costs with a 20% discount, type in
Perhaps, this is exactly how you think % should work.Microsoft, however, chose to make “%” key more user-friendly, perhaps sacrificing some consistency. Windows calculator tries to use the last computed value as “the whole”. Therefore,
will give you how much a $299 dress costs with 20% discount, and will help you calculate 5% tax before applying the discount.Sadly, Google thinks
which is really not that helpful.