WDYL.com by google – What Do You Love?

www.wdyl.com is Google's new product based search engine that was launched quietly today. WDYL (What Do You Love?) lets you search across all the google products like 'Google Translate', 'Google Trends', 'Google Books', 'Sketchup', 'YouTube', 'Google Alerts' at one place.

As usual the user interface of WDYL is very simple and clean with single search box with a button image of white heart on blue background. Cute... The interesting part is that when you brows WDYL without www., you get a 404 (page not found) error.

Type in search box and click on heart, WDYL will display search result from different google’s products on single page neatly arranged in a grid format. There’s a slider on the left part of the page which you can move to quickly access bottom of the page. A big thing that is missing here is Google search result. I think Google search result was supposed to be the first one to be included in this. I have no idea why Google has excluded "Google Search Result" from WDYL?

The concept of WDYL reminds me of iGoogle, a service that lets you add simple apps/websites to your own personalized portal. Overall, it’s a cool idea. You will be able to browse more of the found content without leaving the page. I also found out a few Google products that I didn’t know existed. Cool Idea but I can’t see much use of it in long term. I am including WDYL in my Google’s failed products list. Just another failed product by Google.


WDYSAWDYL (What Do You Say About WDYL(What Do You Love?)?). Why don’t you try out WDYL with different search query and share your interesting discoveries and experiences with me through comment to this post below?

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Google +1 Vs Facebook like button

For past two-three months, google has been using google’s + 1 button on its websites and this is also available to the third party websites. Google +1 button wants to encourage user engagement and social interaction. This is an interesting idea, clearly influenced by the Facebook “Like” button.

With a single click, Google users can recommend a service, a website, an article, or a topic. Consequently, their friends, families, networks or even the rest of the world may easily see their recommendations. For example say you want to search best pub in Bangalore and you will be able to see recommended pub sites, your friend has pressed the +1 Button on. This is an interesting idea, clearly influenced by the Facebook “Like” button, but very much depends on people taking the time to press the +1 button. The Like button on Facebook allows users to publicly show they like a certain person, status, event etc. meaning it is far more a tool of self-expression than recommendation. Both Facebook’s like and Google’s +1 button aim to increase users’ exposure and awareness to an association of persons of the same trade, pursuits or mutual interests, and subsequently gather them through a social network.

Google and Facebook values what their users are sharing with their friends. They use this to know more about the users and to be able to place appropriate ads (targeted marketing) on web pages. Google will be able to personalize the user's search result and search ads. With the help of the +1 button, people with Google accounts who are signed in may see the recommendations from people in their Gmail or Google Talk chat list.

In my opinion, Google +1 will not be able to compete with Facebook in the social networking arena. Facebook has the edge in this area because its users spend a lot of time sharing their thoughts, links, and photos to their friends. This is a problem for Google because the Google doesn't have access to this information and it can’t be indexed as well.

My concern is, do we really need Google +1? We already have FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and hundreds of social networking websites too. I think Google has arrived too late to make a big impact in the social networking world. Is google +1 another failed products by google?

I have added +1 button at the start and at the end of this post. Please do share it.

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Google to scan 250,000 old British Library books

Google Books has an ambitious mission statement: "Google Books is an effort to make all of the knowledge contained within the world's books searchable online."

That's a tall order, but the company will make a dent in it with a new agreement to scan 250,000 books from the British Library.

The books, pamphlets, and periodicals are all out of copyright and come from between 1700 and 1870. This is a nice companion project to the British Library's new 19th Century Books app that will eventually put thousands of old books on your iPad.

To put it in perspective, these books were generated during some famous events you may have heard of, including the French Revolution, the invention of rail travel, and the end of slavery. Google will foot the cost for this mammoth digitizing effort.

The digitized books will be available free online through Google Books and the British Library site. Readers will be able to view, copy, and share the text for non-commercial uses.

Thank you Google. I appreciate it.

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