The project, which it seems no one really knew was going on under the usually forthcoming Google’s surface, takes many of Google’s more valuable services and puts them on one page. You can take a search term, put it in the query field, and a host of different Google tools will bring you information about whatever it is you want to know more about. Interested in the NFL lockout? Search it and Google News and Groups bring you the latest. What to learn about model trains? Google Books and Picasa can bring publications and pictures that you might find useful.

It is difficult to tell for sure exactly which products will be offered by What do you Love? as the product continues ramping up. After all, it has only been on the web for a few hours, and Google still has not said anything to explain the page. In a few simple searches, however, it was easy to see that Picasa, News, Books, Products, Mobile, Translate, Groups, Maps, Alerts, SketchUp, Blogger, YouTube, Trends, and even Patent Search were all involved in the mix. This is clearly no pet project of Google – it is a very clear attempt to make their services more easily accessible to users. It would seem that they have finally realized that people may not want to have to jump from Google News to Google Products when researching a new item they may want to buy – they want it all at once.

It seems that at this point it is fairly important to keep searches a vague as is possible. To see for yourself, type in something simple, like baseball. You will immediately be presented with a host of information of the topic.

Benjamin G. Rader’s 2008 history of the sport titled Baseball appears. Scores from last night’s games between the Cubs and Rockies pop up under news. Ways to say baseball in 57 languages are presented. All interesting information – as long as you do not allow things to get very specific.

Try something a little more focused and the results are far different. A search for Merryll Lynch does not bring up much to browse through at all. There are a few blogs that bring up results, but nothing to write home about. Google Maps is utterly lost, Books cannot offer anything of significance, and even News seems to pull up more foreign headlines than anything else.

Still, for most people taking a casual stroll through the internet, What do you Love? will undoubtedly be helpful in consolidating the exhaustive line of Google products. And those looking for a little more practicality when it comes to specific searches – wait a few weeks. It’s a new product, and if Google has shown us anything in the past, it’s that they tend to make things even better.

You’re probably thinking that I’m a Gmail maniac, or I use Google Maps too much, but this isn’t the case. The reason Google should be thought of highly is that it made (and makes) everyone question the quality of everything, and taught everyone that even the strongest product can be beaten with the right attitude/tools. It first challenged Altavista and other search engines and won. It then built the best Email app ever, made it completely free and gave people masses of storage.

During this period it “Googleized” all its rivals, meaning Yahoo, Microsoft and smaller companies started to act the same way, thinking more community-oriented thoughts and developing their own stuff to the same standard.

I think most of the Twitter phenomenon is because of Google too. Not that they have anything in common, but the same thing is happening here. First there was Twitter, a great idea. Then others came and created Pownce, Plurk, and loads of other, basically identical services. This is great since it guves us variety, and they push each other to do better and better.

Consumer-wise Google made people take top-notch software for granted. When I work with Gmail I expect updates, I expect stuff like themes, Google Labs to come sooner or later and so on. Sure enough, Gmail slowly but surely evolved toward POP, IMAP, a built in task manager, and so on. Making consumers hard to “buy” means that companies try harder and harder, in the end also benefiting the consumer.

Overall, what Google really brought to the table is a kind of internet capitalism that benefits everyone, but mostly the common user. So if you’re bad mouthing Google any time you may actually be right, just remember that many of the quality apps you use today were made, or were made today and not years from now, partly because of Google.