Now Google will tell you what your next job should be

The Internet search engine plans to collect personal data on users so it can advise them on everything from which position to apply for, to how they should spend their days off.

The information they seek and their physical location will be collated and used for lucrative personalised advertising.

Company chiefs believe gathering more facts about its users is a logical step in its mission to organise the world's information.

Google is the world's leading search engine, taking billions of requests in 100 languages including Welsh, Arabic and Russian. In the U.S. alone, it carried out 3.8billion searches last year - 55 per cent of the entire market.

The verb "to google" - meaning to search on line - was added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year.

The company recently started its information- collecting mission by launching iGoogle, which can be personalised to feature news feeds and local weather.

It remembers if a registered user has searched for a particular site such as a cinema in the past, and automatically places that site at the top of search lists.

Chief executive Eric Schmidt said he expected that, during the next five years, the site would move towards collecting increasing amounts of information to personalise searches.

"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?' 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 company stresses that its personalisation services are optional at the moment.

But concerns have been raised about privacy because of the information Google collects on users.

Earlier this year it agreed to discard information about the Internet searches made after two years, following pressure from privacy activists.

Google software engineer Sepandar Kamvar defended the collection of personal information.

"The key thing is to get the best search results for our users. We cannot do that if we ignore the user doing the searching.

"If you take that further with personalised searches you can look at the context of the user to get better results.

"You can then start heading towards queryless searching, where recommendations of sites or videos, for example, will come up on the homepage."

Google was set up in 1996 by two students at Stanford University, California. The name comes from a misspelling of the word "googol" which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

As well as the standard search it offers an e-mail service. Last year it bought the popular video-sharing site YouTube for £884million.

Through the Google Earth facility, users can zoom in on aerial and satellite images of streets, homes and offices anywhere in the world.

Yahoo unveiled a new search engine this year called Project Panama. It monitors what Internet users do and uses that information to build a profile of their interests.

These profiles are then used to display adverts to those who are most likely to be interested.