Actually, I think there's a lot of sci-fi in speculating what Google does with the data available to them. But then again fiction usually predetermines the direction science is trying to head in. There're an awful lot of possibilities we and other webmasters on other forums see in how we'd examine the information to track down certain things. User behaviour, site behaviour, spammers and so on.
But lately I came to think that if the search and the advertising network takes an infrastructure this big, and it still lacks in performance...
Things like Google tracking webmaster IPs in analytics, webmaster tools and adwords, adsense, things like Google using the toolbar data to its full potential, things like Google setting up a predicted pattern for every query...
Would be possible, but only one by one, and only in theory.
They'd need servers two to three times the amount they have right now to do all the things we assume they are doing right now.
The totalitarian ruler of search is but an utopia.
I say Google struggles on an everyday level as it is.
Not financially, but with its infrastructure, and how it can deal with the amount of data it collects.
