WDYL (What Do You Love)

» see wdyl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Google put wdyl.com live on 27 June 2011 without a blog post, and TechCrunch noticed the same day. The page was one text field and a button with a heart on it instead of a magnifying glass. You typed a thing you liked, and the site fired that single query at a stack of Google properties at once, then stacked the answers down the page: a map, videos, books, patents, blog posts, a trends chart, a translation, an alert you could subscribe to.

The internal logic was obvious enough. Google by 2011 had twenty-odd search verticals that almost nobody knew existed, and something like Patents or Trends was a destination you had to already know the address of. WDYL was a single door onto all of them, which made it a demo of the company's own catalog as much as a search engine. It carried 124 language editions, so it did not fail for lack of reach.

Its one genuinely strange feature was the censor. Search for something Google considered inappropriate and WDYL declined to answer, serving instead a page about kittens with a rainbow behind them. Not an error message and not a lecture, just kittens. It is the only part of the product anyone still writes about.

Distance on this one is a matter of scale rather than geography. WDYL worked in Turkish and it worked from Ankara the same as anywhere else, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. A product can be globally available and still be too small to leave a mark, and five years of uptime turns out to be no guarantee that anyone will have formed a habit around you.

~ the dossier ~

~ the kittens ~

The kitten page is worth sitting with for a second, because it was 2011 and the industry had not yet settled into the tone it uses now for refusals. A modern service tells you it cannot help with that request, in the voice of a compliance department. WDYL showed you animals. The refusal did the same work, but the framing admitted the whole thing was a toy, and Google was still willing to say that out loud on one of its own domains.

~ the redirect, then the 404 ~

The archive dates the ending closely. The last capture of a working WDYL front page is 7 March 2016, about 2,500 bytes of the usual layout. By 13 March the domain is answering with a 301 to Google's homepage, and it keeps doing that through April. From 23 April 2016 onward it is a plain 404, and it stayed a 404 for years, which is why Wikipedia's infobox still dates the death to July 2018. That is the month somebody checked, not the month it ended.

Google never announced the shutdown, the same way it never announced the launch. There is no farewell post, no migration notice, no sunset FAQ of the kind Reader and Wave and Buzz all got. Five years of a working product ended with an HTTP status code changing.

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