Widget for time span (e.g. "38 days from now", "38 days from today")

yokoffing

Here's a few examples:

Bing:

Google:

Vlad

yokoffing Interesting, what is the use case for this?

yokoffing

Vlad Sometimes, you need to know how far away a date is.

I use this feature for timelines at work all the time.

Here's another example:

Vlad

yokoffing What I do not like about most of these is that you need to know exactly how to ask the question, or it does not work.

Not to mention that it is also not horizontally scalable - it will not work in any language other than English.

yokoffing

Vlad What I do not like about most of these is that you need to know exactly how to ask the question, or it does not work

One could say that about a lot of queries lol.

What works for me so far is:

12 days from today
3 days from now
what is 7 days from now
what is 40 days from today
when is march 1st
13 days from Feb 24

All those are reasonable queries. They work on Bing; I assume they do on Google as well.

Vlad it will not work in any language other than English

If I Google search for 12 dias desde hoy (Spanish: "12 days from today"), Google's date widget works.

It's doable, even if we needed to support the top 5-10 languages first and build the rest later.

Vlad

yokoffing It is doable, but the amount of work to support just this one query, in every language, is astonishing from a perspective of pain/gain at this stage.

A much better solution may be to allow for a custom widget API so that users can build widgets such as this one.

yokoffing

Vlad It is doable, but the amount of work to support just this one query, in every language, is astonishing from a perspective of pain/gain at this stage.

I hear you, but if Bing and Google can do it, we should at least match them.

Maybe create it for English users for now, and add as a "to do" for other languages later? Just a thought.

tuesday

Vlad Oo, custom widgets would be very cool 👀 Is there an existing feature request open for that?

Vlad

yokoffing

I hear you, but if Bing and Google can do it, we should at least match them.

They both exist for 20+ years, have $150B in cash, and 100,000+ employees. This is a pure physical work, non-scalable thing, that you can not outsmart, unless we create a custom widget API and let users do this.

Vlad

tuesday It is pretty much work in progress, we have the specification document