GOOGLE doesn’t like to admit that it makes mistakes, but at its Zeitgest conference yesterday Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, conceded it needed to reintegrate its mushrooming family of products back into its original search offering.

Mr Schmidt said that the company, which prides itself on giving its engineers 20 per cent of their work time to pursue personal projects, had changed its strategy to ensure that the disparate efforts didn’t spiral out of control.

“Innovation is best delivered by small teams,” Mr Schmidt said, “but there is a penalty for that. We are changing our strategy to ensure that products are not developed in isolation.”

However, characteristically, Mr Schmidt’s view was not endorsed by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, who has the responsibility for the company’s overall product development. Mr Page said that he would like “five times more products than I’m currently reviewing,” and argued that new products can be gradually integrated into the core search.

The duo were making a rare British appearance at The Grove hotel in Hertfordshire — which is also being used by the England team for their World Cup preparations — at a packed conference also addressed by David Cameron, Sir Martin Sorrell, Tom Glocer and Peter Gabriel, designed to boost the Silicon Valley company’s position among opinion-formers in Europe.

Google is best known for its search engine, the world’s most popular, but the highly profitable company has developed a string of new products, including Google Earth, which links aerial photography with yellow pages information, and Gmail, its webmail service, as it tries to respond to competition by innovation.

Mr Schmidt, however, said that the standalone strategy had not necessarily worked in the case of Froogle, the company’s shopping search engine, and he said that it “made sense that Google should include Froogle in the core search”. Compared with the original Google, Froogle has failed to take off, and many web surfers don’t even know that it exists.

Other projects have run into controversy — the company’s initiative to scan in library books and let them be searched online without the publisher’s permission has prompted a legal conflict between book groups and the search engine in a row over copyright. However, Mr Page dismissed the complaints, arguing that there was “a business negotiation going on through lawsuits. We will follow copyright law, and this project is within the law. People are very confused on this point; what we want to do is allow people to search library books for references. We don’t believe that you should see the whole book.”

Mr Schmidt and Mr Page shared a stage at the end of the evening, with a double act performance in which the 50-year-old chief executive frequently deferred to the 33-year-old who co-founded Google in 1998. The two made a virtue of their periodic disagreements, arguing that they ran the company by stimulating debate among themselves and the other co-founder Sergey Brin.

Both men were tight-lipped about future company plans, but there were broad hints that Google was working on an electronic television listing guide, with Mr Schmidt asking, rhetorically, “what is a programming guide, but a search tool?” and noting that existing programming guides covered only 500 cable or satellite channels, rather than the tens of thousands available over the net.

Mr Schmidt, however, did predict that the world’s biggest internet market would not be China, but India in “about five or ten years from now based on current trends” and said that he believed that Hindi could become one of the world’s three internet languages in conjunction with English and Chinese. China’s development, by implication, will be held back by political factors.

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