A recent article on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network took a look ahead to 2012, outlining how Google seeks to create even more value from the one billion searches passed through it’s algorithms each day. Blogger Brian Whalley focused on three key issues ahead for Google:

1. “Search results will include more direct info.”

This boils down to nothing more than giving searchers what they want faster. As you may have noticed over the years, Google has added numerous features that allow folks to get answers quickly. These functions–including simple calculations, finding nearby movie showtimes, and even more–have allowed folks to take some of the most common daily inquiries and make them a basic function of Google.

Google now wants to expand on that toolset of functions by working with web developers to create websites that are more-meaningfully coded (a la schemas) so that the Google algorithms can pour through website content faster and learn more about the content than ever before.

2. “Google is entering new industries and markets.”

Speaking primarily of Google’s purchase of “a software company that created airfare and travel management software for airlines and resellers”, Whalley outlined how Google is further automating and simplifying the process of uncovering flight options. A quick Google search of “AUS to BWI” will give you a taste of what Google is doing in this newly acquired market of their own.

Because of the strength of Google’s search algorithms, and the years of “wisdom” that Google’s algorithms have taken in, it’s certain that Google will continue to reach into new markets to create tools that lure more users to their simple, responsive results.

3. “The data that Google makes available will be reduced.”

Though the first two items are more intriguing than threatening, this last issue would rightly concern just about any web marketer. Whalley suggests that Google will continue to make less and less of its background/analytic data available to web marketers, as it has begun doing already in 2011. This strategy shouldn’t, however, be unexpected of a company whose primary value is derived from usage of it’s “informative” product rather than delivery of some tangible one.

Google will likely stop spoon feeding to users the vast wealth of data behind their firewalls, a move necessary to keep from providing competitors the recipe to their always-sweetening dish.

Google will undoubtedly innovate search marketing in 2012, perhaps taking it to new horizons users never sought possible. Now to see how the competitive battles amongst the search giants will affect the non-major web marketers that rely on an open search environment as it’s exisited to date.

Read Whalley’s full story here for more.