Google launches “What do you love?”

Google has launched a new service, called What Do You Love?. It has apparently been launched with little fanfare, with only reports from other blog sites announcing the new service.

Visit the page and you are greeted with a familiar Google Search style page with nothing but a search bar and a go button (with a heart on it, how lovely).

What differs with this particular search engine is that it only searches Google. Put in what you love and it will essentially advertise how you could use Google’s services to further your love of whatever it is you put in.

The idea of a Google-searching Google Search sounds like it might crack the fabric of the universe and bend reality in on itself. I’m not sure it won’t.

To test it out, however, I threw Google into this Google-searching Google Search to see what it threw up.

What I get is the options to watch videos of Google using YouTube, ‘scour the Earth’ for Google using Google Earth, search for Google-related patents (one of the two it brought up was a patent called ‘Stain-based optimized compression of digital pathology slides’, noted only because one of the inventors was a Mr Google), or even translate ‘Google’ into 57 languages (hint: it’s ‘Google’ in all of them).

Whilst some of the services offered by Google are not that well known, this meta-service can only be of limited use to most people, especially as a lot of the results are largely the same with your search term substituted for the default, and don’t provide quite as intelligent results as I would like. Ultimately this is just a gimmicky advertising tool for Google’s aspirations of world domination.

Still, amongst all of the options to search google blogs, or plan google events, at least there wasn’t the option to search ‘What do you love?’, as that would definitely have imploded existence.

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Just sayin’: Android hits 500,000 activations a day

Google, apparently, is activating 500,000 Android devices a day. That is an impressive number by anyone’s metric. The last instance I can find with my (admittedly very brief) Google search was 230,000 a day, last September.

That isn’t the point of this post.

I couldn’t help but notice the wording on one of the blogs that reported on Google’s new activations landmark.

At Google I/O in early May, the company boasted that activations were up to 400,000 a day with 100 million cumulative device activations, representing 36 OEMS, 215 Carriers and 310 devices. The pace of growth has been staggering for Android, which hit the 100,000 activations per day milestone in May 2010. By December 2010, that number was up to 300,000 a day.

Now with Honeycomb (an Android variant) tablets hitting the market, the device activations are being supplemented by larger tablet devices, not just smartphones. Indeed, almost every company is putting out a tablet these days, most built off of Google’s Android operating system.

(emphasis mine).

Now, that’s a pretty ambivalent sort of comment, isn’t it? Sure, most manufacturers that are producing tablets are using Android in one way or another, but the vast majority of the tablets out there are still iPads running iOS. And I’ll bet the majority of the Android tablets out there aren’t running the tablet optimised “Honeycomb” variation of Android.

Just sayin’.