Everybody uses it. Many of us have set it as our homepage a long time ago. And we got accustomed to hearing how fast it grows and how many new extensions and secondary services and stuff it has in store for us. But this year, Google could have done a little bit more, according to Google Watch and Clint Boulton.

Google hasn’t yet completely integrated OpenSocial in its Google Apps. True, one can play with it in the iGoogle developer testing area, and it seems like things are turning quite nicely. Especially now that it’s working with Twitter and it’s easier to handle. The pressure of competition will surely push it even faster from behind, because Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and MySpaceID will surely really battle it out for partners in 2009.

Also, Google hasn’t yet found the best way to use the YouTube pot-of-gold. Searches centered on this site have reached approximately 25 percent of the queries made by Google users. But there’s still that legal dispute to settle with Viacom; the company sued Google because of copyright infringement, as Google’s YouTube unit featured some Comedy Central content and some other Viacom media items.  

As for the privacy protection issue, matters are still fuzzy at best. The search engine kept user data for as long as 18 months and Google had reduced that duration to 9 months (from 13). But, last week, Yahoo suddenly decided to lower its own privacy policy to 3 months (even if some people argue that their method of scrambling user IPs is not as correct as simply erasing the data). Lately, European commissioners have been putting a lot of pressure on the major search engines out there to initiate such moves, and Google is still pondering how to respond.