Google Adds Bitcoin Prices And Exchange Rates To Search Results

Looking for the current bitcoin exchange rate can now be done entirely in the Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) search engine.

The Mountain View, California, search giant rolled out support for the virtual currency on Wednesday, nearly a month after Google Finance integrated data from Coinbase, a bitcoin wallet and exchange platform.

“Now that Coinbase’s API is being used on Google, anyone who uses Google can see a graph of current and past bitcoin values compared to U.S. dollars,” Coinbase said in June.

In addition to providing current bitcoin prices directly inside the search engine, Google can also provide conversion rates.

“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 representative told Coindesk.

Google’s move to integrate bitcoin conversions into its search engine follows the February addition, by Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), of bitcoin currency conversions to Bing and the integration of bitcoin prices into Yahoo Finance by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO).

To use the feature, a user can simply type in “bitcoin price” or “BTC” to get the current price of the cryptocurrency.

But investors should be wary about using the price and conversion tool, which doesn’t necessarily reflect real-time bitcoin and currency conversions, according to Google Finance’s disclaimer.

In midday trading, one bitcoin was valued at $619.20.