Google have always been good at coming up with clever new ideas, their innovation and execution often though leaves a lot to be desired. A great recent example of this was their first incarnation of Google TV, which never really took off as well as it should have done, owing to a number of operational difficulties - most significantly, failing to get media content providers onboard.
With ’What do you love?’ Google cannot use the same excuses, as it is exclusively showcasing its own leading technologies on a single screen. Like I said at the start, the idea is a great one, but the execution is a little flawed at present.
I cannot get anything to appear in the ’Latest news on...’ panel for instance - I even went to the Google News site and selected a word from one of their lead stories ’Greece’ which is what the above visual is of. In fact, a number of the panels are oddly showing blanks / ’No results were found’, obviously when there should be content there. Many of those panels also are simply just proxy advertisements for a particular Google technology and do little else than encourage you to use it on your mobile device etc.
I can see this being a great resource when it gets fully up and running and when all the little launch issues are ironed out. I can see this being in part Google’s answer to more clever evolving search engines - like the excellent Wofram|Alpha, although Google needs to work on its data graphs to provide any real competition.
At the moment WDYL is just a nice widget really, which does not have the succinct saliency of Wolfram|Alpha, nor the carefully complied detail of Wikipedia.
Most likely its main intended use is an advertisement for Google’s many different platforms, rather than a properly usably reference resource.
Related
How can Google improve the user experience of WDYL?What features could enhance the functionality of 'What do you love'?In what ways can WDYL compete with Wolfram|Alpha effectively?How might Google integrate more content providers into WDYL?What strategies could Google employ to reduce blank results in WDYL?
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