Google's 'What do you love?' is an interesting work in progress

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.