Google's Secret Weapon

A growing share of searches, users and data also give the company more insight into "dwell time" -- or the amount of time users spend wandering over different Web pages off Google search results -- than competitors, Arnold points out. That helps the company determine which pages are of more interest to certain types of users, thereby increasing the quality of search results.

Finally -- and somewhat counterintuitively -- Google's push towards increasingly personalized search will be a big beneficiary of the company's growing reams of large-scale aggregate data, says Kortikar. Individual users will benefit because personalized search attempts will lead to customized, rather than generic, results.

Personalized search is a part of major Google products like iGoogle, which was launched in 2006 and has seen among the fastest adoption rate of any Google product, Google vice president of search products Marissa Mayer told TheStreet.com in a prior interview.

It was also the centerpiece of a move announced by the company this fall that would take consecutive user queries in the same browser window into account when determining subsequent search results, rather than treat each query as if it were independent.

Fine Tuning the Search Results

While honing in on each user's preferences is the aim of personalized search, the enormous statistical power that comes from having such a large data set allows Google to fine-tune its results to such a great extent, says Kortikar.