Doesn't work when you don't type it out correctly. It's interpreting the "m" as million and "in" as inches. Use "m to ft" to get it every time
There's no correct and incorrect here. The help page (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/3284611) doesn't even mention which word you should use, and it of course depends on the language you use. As a German speaker, I naturally use "in", and that always worked for me (I use this a lot), except for this example.
It seems to be interpreting the m to indicate million and in to be inches
Google did exactly what you told you to do.
It seems the unit was changed, look below the numbers
But it wasn't. I get the same result for this exact query. It seems to be like explained in another answer: Google interprets the "m" as million and the "in" as inch, so it gives you just some conversion for 17 million inches. It's a bit random here how Google interprets things. "17.21 m in" (that one really could mean 17 million inches) is correctly taken as a meter-inch conversion, while "17.21m in" does a conversion from 17.21 meters to kilometers (where are they coming from?).
