With all the fuss about Bing and the hope that Yahoo will soon release something new and useful (its been a while, so almost anything would do) it’s easy to lose sight of the frantic innovation going on under the skin at Google.

Of course, there are probably thousands more projects in their pipeline than I’m covering here, but, anyway, these are some of my eagerly anticipated favourites, feel free to suggest your own below:

Their “big tricks” this year are likely to be:

• Increased performance from the new advertising formats on Youtube as they continue to evolve
  
• (Hopefully) increased usage in China, due to market growth, even if they don’t gain market share
• Google Book search (for scanned, out of print books) might one day go live
• Google Apps (their Office rival) is now out of Beta and good, although a little basic, and highly likely to be developed further
• Increasing revenues from Mobile and Television advertising
• Making Google Voice (their telephone number service) available to more customers
• Continuing to push their browser Chrome, mobile/set-top-box OS Android and Chrome operating system for netbooks and PCs
  Expect to see even more hardware manufacturers signing up and, for the first time, Chrome to be shipped pre-installed on some PC.

Which Google services are you waiting for?