Determining the price of goods and services in different currencies has long been a helpful feature of Google. If a user wants to find out how much x amount of dollars equals euro then all the person has to do is type it in. The same can now be applied to bitcoin.
For months now, the bitcoin community has been clamoring for the search engine juggernaut to incorporate a bitcoin price converter into its search query. Google caved in and implemented the feature Tuesday and users simply type in “bitcoin price,” “currency to bitcoin,” “1 USD to BTC” and “price of bitcoin.”
Individuals can also access the same bitcoin information on Google Search’s smartphone app.
According to bitcoin news reports, Google has partnered with Coinbase to help support the BTC conversions. This is just one other important step for the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency’s entrance into the mainstream.
“You can also ask Google to do conversions – if you have the Google Search app on your smartphone, for example, ask it, ‘How many bitcoin are in 500 U.S. dollars?’ and you’ll get the answer in a handy conversion tool,” a Google spokesperson told CoinDesk.
An important note to make is that there have been some minor reports that global users are having difficulty accessing the newest bitcoin feature.
Indeed, Google isn’t the first search engine to add such a feature. As we reported last month, Bing and DuckDuckGo have been two search engines that have already inserted bitcoin prices into its relevant search queries. Therefore, the two companies already beat Google to the punch, but considering that Google dominates a substantial majority of the search engine market, it wouldn’t necessarily matter.
This comes about a month after Google added bitcoin into its finance webpages. When users enter “CURRENCY:BTC” on Google Finance, readers are provided with bitcoin prices, the latest bitcoin headlines and related quotes.
In addition, Yahoo! Finance also installed bitcoin into its enormous financial network. By viewing “BTCUSD=X,” visitors can gather important snapshot bitcoin data, such as day and 52-week price ranges, interactive charts, prices and the latest headlines from around the world.
This year, some of the major online retailers and businesses have announced that they have offered the digital currency as a method of payment for customers. Newegg, Dish, Expedia, TigerDirect and Overstock have been some of the names to make the virtual currency a part of their business model.
Price volatility may be subsiding, too, as the price of bitcoin has remained relatively stable at around the $620 mark (at the time of this writing).
