Google this week held a press conference to announce where the company was going, what it had achieved in the past year and what it believes it can do to empower users to better find information. Among the first few things that Google spoke about was its technology: crawling, ranking, and indexing. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt emphasized that the company was growing rapidly, but despite the huge growth, the technology that Google had developed was able to scale without breaking a sweat. In terms of corporate growth, Google is still looking into different markets and Schmidt mentioned that acquiring smaller companies was something that was going to be a normal practice.

Google also shared a few product launches at the event. The company introduced a new version of Google Desktop, which is its downloadable local search application. Being introduced with Google Desktop 4 is a feature called Gadgets, which will be familiar to users of Apple's OS X. Similar to OS X's widgets feature, Google's Gadgets allows users to develop tiny applications that can be called up and used. Focused on convenience and easy access, Gadgets can be anything, ranging from clocks, to calculators, stock tickers, tiny games and more.

Off the desktop and back on line, Google moved its Trends application out of beta status. Trends allows users to learn about what other people are using Google for. While not quite as extensive as Google Finance, Trends will be a unique tool for advertisers, web developers, and general market study.

Another unique product that Google is introducing is called Google Notebook. The online application which is integrated into Google, follows a user's search behavior. tracking what they search for and what information is in the results that they traverse to. Google Notebook collects information gathered from all these sources and compiles them into an extensive journal that can be used later for finding more detailed and relevant information.

With all the new announcements about Google's corporate strategy and product announcements, one thing is clear: Google's pace of development will not be slowing down. Recently, we reported that Google may be launching a health website dedicated to medical information. Earlier in the year, we revealed that information was leaked about Google thinking of providing users unlimited storage for all types of files.

For webmasters, Google recently introduced a new feature to its AdSense advertisement program that pays for users to install Google Pack, which is a collection of desktop software. Google will also pay for users to install Picasa, its photo library application.