Speaking to reporters in London, CEO Eric Schmidt discussed Google’s lofty search ambitions - prompting Drudge and many in the Blogosphere to cry Big Brother.

According to a Financial Times article this morning, Schmidt discussed the need to gather personal information in order to offer even more user-specific results.

“We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion…The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

In addition to Google’s expanding product library, the company clearly sees its future as being the company in contextual advertising space. Their ambitions are to get more relevant in search as well as to offer ads that people actually want.

Google plays such a large role in daily life that concerns like this are to be expected. The question is, and has always been how much privacy are people willing to give up for better service?

Google is constantly talking about its search in terms of the network effect - the more people the more powerful the results - or as Schmidt puts it, “the sum of what the world thinks is the truth.”

Now that Google has enlisted most of the world their natural next step is to get more local. The closer they can get to the end user, the better service they can offer, but how personal will we let them get?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 1:50 am and is filed under News, advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.