Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, sought to down play down fears this afternoon about the size and scale of the internet giant, as he outlined plans to develop personalised searches based on user information.

The company boss told a news conference in Paris that Google was "not a country; we don't have nuclear bombs. We're just a company" as he challenged questioners who implied that the company was becoming too large, or controlling too much data.

That followed a speech in which he said that "personalisation was the next big phenomenon" for Google, giving an example in which he wanted the search engine to be able to distinguish what a surfer might mean when they type the query "Paris is very hot".

In time Google would be able to determine whether the query was aimed at finding information about air conditioning systems in the French capital, or news, and pictures of the incarcerated American heiress -- by collecting data from users.

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Google. Who's looking at you?

It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend — or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?

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Mr Schmidt cited the introduction of iGoogle -- a Yahoo! like service -- which allows users to create a personalised home page with news and other information feeds, as an early stage example, describing the application as "exploding in its use, in a way that was surprising to me".

Improving personalisation will require the consent of users to data capture, and earlier in the day Merissa Mayer, who runs the company's search products, indicated that Google was interested in asking whether people would be willing to agree to have data about their searches kept beyond the 18-month limit the company has recently agreed to.

Mr Schmidt also took the opportunity to praise Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo! who was ousted amid shareholder pressure earlier this week. Like Mr Schmidt, Mr Semel was brought in as an experienced manager at a young internet company and the two men took over as chief executives at roughly the same time in 2001.

He described his rival as "remarkably successful" and said that he often talked to Mr Semel because they both "understood they had to grow the market" and added: "I am sure people at Yahoo! will miss him".

The Google chief executive was speaking after the company's subsidary YouTube had revealed plans to introduce a string of international websites, and including content and channels targeted at the UK. He said that "YouTube was not focused on making large amounts of money" at this stage, but instead "growing its audience base," although he declined to spell out YouTube's level of losses.

YouTube, he said, was "experimenting pre-roll and post-roll [before and after a clip] advertising" as its model becomes more akin to free-to-air television. "It looks like it will become a successful business for us" -- although neither he nor YouTube's founders provided many statistics to measure progress other than saying that six hours of content were uploaded every minute.

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