• Financial Times , Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:17 PM

Google CEO Eric Schmidt shared an interesting view of what he foresees in the Web giant's future with the Financial Times. Schmidt said gathering more personal data is key to the company's core goal of organizing the world's information. "We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalization," he said. "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?' "

That's right, Google doesn't want us to have to think for ourselves in the future. The search giant will one day do that for us. Imagine the query "What do I want to eat today?" Google might answer, "Your eating patterns indicate that today you would be most satisfied by Indian food." Google Local then might tell you which Indian food place would be best.

Right, well that's all very far-fetched and far in the future. For the time being, Google's stepped up its efforts to gather personalized information in three key areas: iGoogle, a personalized Google home page a la My Yahoo; Google personalized search, which combines user data from Google News, Gmail, Google Search and the rest of Google's products to deliver the most relevant results to users (per their permission); and Google Recommendations, where the search engine suggests products and services the user might like based on demonstrated behaviors. The idea, says Schmidt, is to collect more of this information to sell more relevant advertising.

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