Now Google wants to help you plan your life

IT ALREADY finds the answers to millions of questions every dayfor internet users around the world.

Now Google says it does not yet "know enough about you" and isstepping up its efforts to collect personal information on the web.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of the world's biggest searchengine, said the storage of personal data through the web was "themost important aspect of Google's expansion".

He envisaged a day when it would be able to advise users oneverything from their career moves to how they should spend theirfree time, based on the collected queries they had tapped into thesearch page.

"The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questionssuch as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'," hesaid.

The relaunched iGoogle, which allows users to personalise theirGoogle site, coupled with a service that stores web-surfing history,will play a vital role in the evolution of the technology.

The race to have the most comprehensive personal information isthe new battleground for search engine companies.

But it is also raising fears among millions of internet surfersabout how much information is being stored by companies about whichthey have little knowledge.

"Anyone surprised by this should also be surprised at the amountof information about them that is already being collected and storedin others areas, such as loyalty cards," Gareth Crossman, thedirector of policy at civil liberties organisation Liberty, said."This is another example of the commercial value of our personalinformation. They don't want it because they're interested in us -they want it because it has a commercial value to other companies.

"If we behaved rationally as consumers, we would withhold thisinformation or charge more for it. But that fact is that many of usare signing away personal data in exchange for internet services or ahandful of loyalty points."

Google already holds a vast amount of personal information aboutmany of its users - ranging from the contents of e-mail from itsGmail service to credit card details through its online paymentsystem, Google checkout. The information is held in a vast network ofmassive "server farms" - the company's fleet of digital data centresinto which it is estimated to have pumped billions of dollars.

Such information is key to the online advertising industry, whichuses portraits of consumers to target campaigns.

But a spokesman for Google stressed that Mr Schmidt's commentsreferred only to the company's web-search histories and would beoptional.

Mr Crossman said: "The risk is not just in what informationordinary consumers are handing over to companies they don't know, butalso where that information is being stored and who has access to it.

"We have already seen that data stored on behalf of companies isnot always secure from hackers."

Other online companies have launched similar services. Yahoocreated Project Panama, which builds profiles of what its userssearch for.

The Information Commissioner's Office in the UK said it was notconcerned about the developments.

But data leaks have already sparked fears over personalinformation that can be gleaned from search behaviour.

Last year, the internet portal AOL accidentally released detailsof 20 million private search queries from 658,000 of its users to theonline public.

Alongside searches for Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears, darkerqueries typed into the AOL search engine included: "How to tell yourfamily you're a victim of incest" and "How to kill your wife".

Google has also faced concerns that its proposed GBP 1.5 billionacquisition of DoubleClick will lead to an erosion of online privacybecause it could combine its records of web searches with theinformation from DoubleClick's "cookies", the software it places onusers' machines to track which sites they visit.