Google has ideas about what you might want to see online—even when you're not doing a search. It's offering its suggestions through a service called Google Related, which works as an extension for the company's Chrome Web browser or for the Google toolbar. The company explains:

Whenever you're navigating to a new page, Google Related will look for interesting related content and, if available, display it in a bar at the bottom of your page. Google Related can display categories such as videos, news articles, maps, reviews, images, web sites and more. To preview a listed item or see additional items, just use your mouse to hover over different categories in the bar. For example, when you hover over a video link, the video pops up in a preview box and you can play the video directly on the page.

Early observers note that Google Related often directs users to Google products, such as Maps, Places, and News. SearchEngineLand writes:

The potential benefits for the searcher are saving time, effort, and being able to quickly see if they might have missed something from a source (or a Google property) they might have missed or did not know about.

For Google it means that users will spend more time using Google's services. Of course, it would be possible to monetize the actual Google Related toolbar.

While the product brings out useful information a fair bit of the time, Ars Technica laments that it can't be trained (at least not by users):

Links offered from the Related bar are +1-able, but if you click the "View More Articles" link from the story above, you get a get a long list of stories from various outlets that can't be +1'd. This strikes us as a prime opportunity to teach Google Related which sources you trust or would like to see in your related news tab when you visit a news story. Still, true to Google form, Google is collecting statistics on the project, so we may be training it more than we know.

Using Google Related requires letting Google know what pages you're visiting at all times, which is why it only works with omnipresent Google products such as the company's browser. But it doesn't seem to raise new privacy concerns. PC Magazine dived into the associated privacy policy, and concluded:

Data collected via Related is similar to how Google collects search information. "The Related extension operates by sending Google certain information about your machine and web sites at the time you visit them, including the URL of the web site, your machine's IP address, and one or more Google cookies. This data is retained in Google's server logs and maintained according to our general Privacy Policy," Google said.

But users may still find Google's suggestions invasive, suggests E-week:

When Google isn't speeding up searches with its Instant predictive search technology, it finds other ways to cram more search results in front of users' eyes. For example, Google late last year launched Instant Previews to show users a sneak peek of search results they might be interested in learning more about before they click on results. ... Google.com was forged with a Spartan existence, but the company in the past year is finding more ways to crowd the user experience for profit. It will be interesting to see any pushback.

In a move that will "noticeably" affect more than 10 percent of all search queries, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that's aimed at reducing the ranking of lower quality sites.

The official blog post didn't say the phrase "content farms" - sites such as Demand Media that churn out articles designed to attract traffic from search queries. However, many believe that content farms are indeed a key target of the change.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand writes:

How can I say the Farmer Update targets content farms when Google specifically declined to confirm that? I'm reading between the lines. Google previously had said it was going after them. ... From Google's earlier blog post, content farms are places with "shallow or low quality content." ... That content is what the algorithm change is going after.

Demand Media has strenuously objected to being labeled a content farm, and posted a response to the changes on its blog:

As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results. ... It's impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term - but at this point in time, we haven't seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business.

Whatever the company says, consumers seem to have a hunger for blocking results from content farms. Search startup Blekko has gained a lot of attention for helping people block these sites:

It's a method intended to block the low-quality pages that pollute the results of more established competitors, says Rich Skrenta, a cofounder of the company, which has raised $24 million in funding since 2007. "Various bad actors have created the bulk of URLs on the Web today," Skrenta says. As examples, he sites spam blogs and companies like Demand Media, which pay people small fees to write content designed mainly to rank high in search results.

Google recently launched an extension for Chrome that allowed people to block sites they didn't want to see in results. The company noted that it did not use this data to construct the recent changes—but Google certainly consulted it. The official blog post notes:

We did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt played make believe and sketched out his vision of the future on stage at TechCrunch's Disrupt event in San Francisco today.

"It's a future where you don't forget anything...In this new future you're never lost...We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time...Your car will drive itself, it's a bug that cars were invented before computers...you're never lonely...you're never bored...you're never out of ideas."

Schmidt filled in his vision with concrete examples of Google's immediate future and strategy. "What we're really doing is building an augmented version of humanity," he mused before going on to talk about how smart phones, "the defining iconic device of their time," can become real-time translators for speech.

Credit: Dave Getzschman/TechCrunch

"We can now demonstrate and are getting ready to ship products that let you speak in English and have it come out of a phone at the other end in German," said Schmidt.

Cloud servers convert the speech to text--a core feature of phones with Google's Android operating system--after which the tech behind Google translation service generates corresponding German text that can be spoken aloud by the recipient's phone. Schmidt echoed the feelings of many when he said "for me this is the stuff of science fiction."

Search remains a focus for Google, though, he said and it is set to get even smarter. "Where do we go next with search? You've got personal context. With your permission, and I need to say that about 500 times, we can make all these answers so much better."

That context could include your search history as well as that of your friends, as well as your other information stored with Google, as long as you allow it. Given enough information search engines could become "autonomous," said Schmidt, helping you at all times without your even typing a query.

"I'm interested in history, as I'm walking down the street in San Francisco I want my mobile device to tell me about the history here, think of it as a serendipity engine," said Schmidt. He went on to say that Google is working to figure out what people really want when they search. For example a query for the weather may be fundamentally motivated by your wanting to know whether to wear a jacket or to water the garden. A smart search engine should be able to answer such questions when you search for the weather in your city.

But despite hints of greater social features, and the value of the data they could provide, Schmidt dodged a question about Google Me, calling it a "rumored product I won't comment on."

He was more forthcoming when asked about what it means when Google promises to be open. "The easiest comparison to do today is the Apple model," he explained, "you have to use their development tools, their hardware, their software, when you submit an application they have to approve it. That would not be open. So the inverse would be open."

Schmidt finished with a claim that the technology augmenting humanity would be more inclusive than that which came before. "This is a future for the average person, not just the elite. Because of technology, because of internet access, this is a market for one billion now, two billion soon, and in our lifetime five-to-six billion altogether."