Google has just launched a new amalgamated search engine, What Do You Love, as its Google+ platform is setting a land-speed record for fastest social launch.
WDYL.com lets users explore their passions (food, movies, film, monkeys) and pulls in results from Google’s various search products: photos, video, books, maps, blogs, groups, news, patents.
The intra-Google search comes as Google+ is on track to zip past 20 million users by the weekend.
That’s according to Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, who based his study by counting surnames on Google+ and comparing them to US Census Bureau data.
The two week old social network, in a limited field test, has been reported to have grown 350% between July 4 and July 10, from 1.7 million to 7.3 million users. Allen took a sampling of 100 to 200 surnames on Google+ to form his estimate, assuming 2.12 non-US users for every American using Google+.
"My model is based on US Census Bureau data about how many people there are in the U.S. with each surname. I've described before the shortfalls of this model for calculating non-US users. But I haven't seen a better methodology from anyone else yet about estimating Google+ growth, so I'll continue to work on this one," commented Allen.
If the genealogical expert is right in his begets, Google+ has been signing up more than one million people daily, on average, since its June 28 launch.
In 2009, Facebook, at its height of growth was gaining nearly a million new users a day. But for Google+, how many of those signing up for are 'active users' (or just curious)? Google refuses to comment.
In any case, it's clear that the search giant has big plans for Google+, including integrating its commerce-based Shopper app and Offers service, now beta-launching in New York and San Francisco (see below).
As for Google+ users concerned about privacy, they can now conceal their gender, while its highest-profile user to date is concealing his identity altogether: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has activated the Google+ privacy settings to conceal his activity. He's not the only one, by the way; so have Googlers-in-chief Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
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