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And machines can only do so much. Google also conceded that the scale of its operations, spanning different countries with different regulations, makes a completely automatic system practically impossible.

"There are things such as whether a piece of content is illegal, which cannot be decided by a machine and we have to use lawyers for that," a Google executive said.

The company has also chosen to apply strict censorship rules – "by hand" – on its sites in territories such as China, a move that prompted fierce criticism.

Google also argued that its responsibility to police the internet for material such as child pornography is limited. It says that while it will co-operate with authorities when asked, it is not willing to become involved in "fishing expeditions" for people who are breaking the law.

But the main message from the London Googleplex, the company’s European headquarters, is that the mission to make available online all the globe’s extant content is only just beginning.

Google estimates that around 10 per cent of the world’s information is currently online, and is exploring ways to make the remainder available through the web.

The project could take as long as 300 years, according to a recent estimate given by Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. According to the company, 70 per cent of its engineers are working on search-related problems.

At the top of the agenda are mobile services. From today, mobile users in the UK will be able to access Gmail, Google’s web-based e-mail service, and Google News, which aggregates news stories, through their phones.

In the future, Mr Merrill suggested, users of such tools might not have to type in search terms or internet addresses. "Imagine a world where you could speak your search query - that would be pretty neat, wouldn’t it?"

Google also has an army of engineers working on automatic translation tools that would render information in any language intelligible in any other.

But Google’s new openness only extends so far. When pressed, the company remains characteristically coy on what it sees as the keys to its future success.

Asked about the search company’s designs on the music market, for instance, one Google executive told Times Online: "We could tell you. But then we’d have to kill you."

Is Google open enough about how its search engine works? have your say here.

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