Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped received two internal Google documents titled "Big Goals and Directions - 2006" and "Objectives and Key Results - Q3 2006 Company OKRs", that outline Google's objectives for this year.

If everything is on the right track, that means Google has already:

* got rid of spam in the top 20 languages
* improved their ad system ("one of their aims was to sell $1B of new inventory")
* pushed their content sites (maybe this is one of the reasons Google bought YouTube)
* optimized page loading for the most visited sites ("any site with over 10 million page views (per day? month?) renders in a second or less, 95% of the time")

Some new products and features that should be launched until the end of the year (or maybe next year):

* a more interactive version of Google News that lets "other news sources, and organizations and individuals mentioned in news stories to debate specific points".
* extract information about time and place from web pages and show search results ordered by time or restricted by time / location.
* enable visitors that have paid subscriptions to (news) websites to access them directly from Google search.

Google attaches straight numbers to its objectives, so when you see they're pushing a certain product or paying for more distribution, it may mean the numbers aren't quite where they should be.

It's also interesting that I wrote something about a new Google News and about "structuring unstructured information", and both are included in Google's plans.</img> </img> </img> </img>