Google appears to have disabled immediate access to its currency conversion widget when you try to check for the latest conversion rate for the ringgit to other foreign currencies, and vice versa. Instead, you’re now required to take some extra steps in order to do so.

To explain, prior to this, Google’s widget would instantly show you the latest conversion rate when you search for currency conversions to and from the ringgit. It would also display a graph that charts the movement of the rate over a period of a time (over the course of one day, five days, a month, a year, five years, and so on).

At present, however, straightforward searches like “1 USD to MYR” or “1 MYR to USD” will only bring up a list of currency conversion websites, displaying the conversion rates from these sources instead. Searches for other currency conversions that do not involve the ringgit, meanwhile, are not impacted; the widget still works for them.  

That’s not to say that there are no workarounds to this, if you absolutely must use Google’s currency conversion widget for your searches. However, it does require a few extra steps. Instead of making a straightforward search like “1 MYR to USD”, you’ll need to first search for other currency pairs, such as “JPY to USD”. From there, you can then select MYR (Malaysian Ringgit) from the dropdown menu that is available, and view the local currency conversion rate via Google’s widget.

This development came following an incident that took place last week, where Google was called out by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) for inaccurately reporting the ringgit exchange rate against the US dollar. Specifically, BNM said that the exchange rate of RM4.98 to US$1 that was reported by the search engine did not reflect the actual trading.

Ada data kadar pertukaran ringgit tidak tepat yang tersebar melalui media sosial berdasarkan data yang salah diterbitkan oleh Google pada 15 Mac 2024. Baca kenyataan akhbar kami di sini https://t.co/GI8cTg4V5n#SiaranAkhbarBNM pic.twitter.com/TqfQzNnJO3

— Bank Negara Malaysia (@BNM_official) March 16, 2024

The central bank also highlighted that this was the second misreporting to have occurred, with the first round having happened back in February 2024. Google eventually issued an apology and said that they have corrected their error.

(Source: Free Malaysia Today)

• TAGS:
• Bank Negara Malaysia
• BNM
• Currency Conversion
• Currency Convert
• Currency Exchange
• Google
• Ringgit