I was playing around with Microsoft’s Live search the other day and found out that it can actually solve higher order quadratics! http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=x^3%2B4*x%3D25&go=&form=QBRE
Anyway, that’s cool and all but I really wanted it to make graphs when I searched for functions. I poked around a little but it doesn’t look like there is any way to plug stuff like that into Live! Luckily for me, Wikia Search is testing / developing their widget framework – codename WISE.
I threw together this WISE widget – http://fp029.sjc.wikia-inc.com/search/search.html#f(x)=x^3+3*x+5
The widget is really just a front end to GNU Plot – http://www.gnuplot.info/
A JS front end is here http://code.setfive.com/gnuplot-ui/ui.html