While I have no reason to doubt the good intentions of Eric Schmidt, I think this makes a lot more sense from Google's point of view, rather than the consumer's

While I have no reason to doubt the good intentions of Eric Schmidt, I think this makes a lot more sense from Google's point of view, rather than the consumer's point of view. Being able to suggest things you may like is in a way at the core of what advertising is. Currently Google does a pretty poor job, both because it's hard to predict human behaviour, and because they mostly use (or used?) the search patterns as a guide. But if you want to make money from ads the obvious area to improve is to tell you what you may like before you even know it. In other words, to me this speech sounds more like an advertiser wondering how to improve the significance of its ads than a search engine wondering how to improve searching.