Google now challanging ITV to be UK's top advertiser

It has been a busy week for Google.

It started last weekend, when a Google employee typed a single backslash in the wrong place at the wrong time. This act resulted in the Google website marking every page on the internet as potentially harmful. The internet was no longer a safe place. Google, the web's gatekeepers, said so.

The breakdown only lasted for around 40 minutes and the company spent the rest of this week trying to make it up to humanity. In just a few days, Google gave us the ability to virtually plunge the depths of the oceans and then track the every movement of friends and family using our mobile phones. It also found time to map Mars and helped set up a new university to prepare scientists for an age when machines are cleverer from man.

All of this frantic activity displays how pervasive and powerful Google has become. No government or organisation in history has held so much information about us. Through its search engine, Google knows our likes, dislikes, even our vices.

Through its email service, GMail, it holds the keys to the private correspondence of millions. Once you send a message to someone using the service, three parties can access it: you, the person you wrote to, and Google. We have to trust all three keep the conversation private. Whether you know it or not, you have a personal relationship with Google, sometimes one more intimate than with the closest of friends.

The signs are that Google will hold even more influence over us in the coming few years, with the company set to release an endless stream of products and projects. These include a plan to digitise and search through almost every book ever published. Another project will allow people to store health records with the site that can update with data coming from medical device. So as a heart rate monitor takes your pulse, for example, it will automatically appear in your Google account. Reportedly, Google even plans to do away with the need for a traditional PC altogether.

Google will do all this for us, and not charge consumers a penny. They even, through their chartiable arm Google.org, have ambitious plans to find alternative energy sources that will replace fossil fuels. Yes, it is trying to save the world.

Google's products have become essential to many of our lives. How will the company continue to impact on us in the next few years? Its motto is: "Don't be evil". At the moment, the world seems to take them at their word. The question is: should we?

It must be remembered that Google can do all of this because of the masses of money it makes from the information we give it - 99 per cent of Google's revenue is from advertising connected to its search engine.

Its search business is lucrative because it's so good at targeting the right adverts to the right person. Type in "pizza" and adverts for pizza chains come up. It is cost effective for the advertiser, as they pay Google only if someone clicks on the advert. And because Google controls over 80 per cent of the world's internet searches, according to market reserachers Net Applications, people do click on these ads - in abundance. Thanks to our searches, a company which started life as a project between two Stanford university students little over ten years ago is now worth more than $107 billion (£72 billion).

So what will Google do with its gargantuan piles of cash?

One thing could be to fundamentally change the way we use computers, and as rumour would have it, just get rid of the PC altogether. Technology circles are abuzz with talk of Google's most ambitious project yet: the GDrive - a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection. The company itself has refused to say anything about it but there is growing speculation that it will release the GDrive sometime this year, fuelled by the leak to a blog of some Google code referring to a GDrive as an "online file backup and storage" device.

Instead of storing private documents, family photos or a music collection on your computer at home, Google will do this for you. The information will be held on one of Google's servers, in amongst its huge farms of supercomputers, that take up spaces the size of football pitches, that the company has built across the globe.

It means that wherever you are, you can get hold of the same things that you were working on at home, provided you have an internet connection. All you need is a portal, something that can run the internet, and not much more than a screen and keyboard. Fat, desktop PCs will be a thing of the past.

The idea raises the same issues of privacy that have dogged Google in the past, and campaigners worry that it will give the company unprecedented access over people's personal information.

"Once information disappears into Google, no-one knows what happens to it," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International. "Google has to grow up. It is acting as an adolescent. If Google wants world domination, it needs to act in an adult way and needs to develop transparency."

But Google says that it is always careful about protecting people's privacy. A spokesperson said: "We're transparent about the data we collect, and we design products that give people control over the information they share."

A good example of this tension is Google Street View, a mapping service where you can see street-level photographs of a given area; an obviously useful service for anyone who has got lost gazing at a map. The service is expected to be rolled out in Britain later this year.

However, within hours of it being launched in the US, photographs of downtown San Francisco and New York hit the internet. Bloggers posted images of people from the service, their faces visible, being arrested, sunbathing and urinating in public. Google seems to have learned its lesson, with faces and number plates now completely blurred in Street View, and other safeguards firmly in place.

Many of Google's brightest ideas come from the attempt to fulfil its almost hopelessly ambitious mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Upcoming projects will go some way to achieving this goal. Amongst them is Google Book Search. For the past few years, Google have been scanning the pages of books in order to eventually release them online and make them fully searchable.

The theory is that you could type "Harry Potter" into Google, and J.K. Rowling's novels could appear on your screen, ready to be read. It means that people will be able to access millions of titles online, even ones that are now out-of-print, and many for free.

To this end, Google secured one of the biggest publishing deals of all time, reaching a $125 million settlement with American authors and copyright holders, allowing them to launch the service including titles within copyright. At the time, writers seemed happy with a deal that secured them cash but made their work more available to more people. Booksellers worried whether Google's move would drive them out of business.

"We don't own or create content - we help people to find it," said a Google spokesperson. "It's then up to the owner whether to offer it for nothing or charge for it."

Also, Google are big players in the battle over how internet users access and interact with the web in the future. Last September, they launched a new web browser called Chrome, trying to take on the might of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. As well as using the internet on personal computers, however, more and more people are accessing the web on their mobile phones. Surfing on the phone used to be an exercise in frustration. It was slow and web pages appeared garbled. A phone was simply not designed to do tasks such as view pictures or play videos.

So Google decided to create a better operating system for mobile phones, just as Microsoft's Windows helps a user to operate a PC. Unlike Windows, however, Google's software for mobiles, called Android, will be free.

Last year, the first phone running Google's software, the T-Mobile G1 was launched. Many more are expected this year. It could mean that the next phone you buy may well be a Googlephone.

Google did not just create Android out of the kindness of its heart. The company does not shy away from the fact that serious money can be made thanks to people using phones to connect to the web. The reasoning is simple: If more people access the internet, more will use Google and click on its advertising, which makes the company billions.

All of this activity begs the question: is Google becoming too powerful?

"If an electricity company owned most of the world's grids there would be an outcry, and people would soon realise the need for open competition," said Simon Davies. "Google are far too powerful, far too monopolistic and far too dangerous."

Others worry about how confident we can be that the vast amounts of data Google is accumulating can ever be completely secure.

"The idea that Google systems cannot be compromised, that employees of Google are all saints and won't be subverted in some way is very naive," said Ian Angell, a Information systems expert at the London School of Economics. "It's like believing that all civil servants are honest. Having all this information in one place is a private detective's dream."

Professor Angell argued that Google's track record is admirable, but problems could come in the future. He said: "If it is a choice between Google holding my details and the British Government holding my details, I'd give them to Google every time. I see more nuisance value than evil intent." But he added: "The moment any organisation gets too vast, hubris takes over and then they fail."

The fact is, Google will continue to have a dramatic impact on lives in the years to come. The onus will be on the public to keep as close an eye on Google, as it already does on us.