"Would we move to MediaCity? Maybe...but not yet."

MATT Brittin, the chief executive of Google in the UK and Ireland, claims his firm "wouldn't say no" to pitching up on Salford Quays - although there are a few projects that the firm needs to concentrate on first.

Brittin visited the BBC's new offices on MediaCityUK this week at the invitation of the University of Salford, but when asked what it would take for Google to move into the Peel-owned development, his answer was: 'Not much".

"We don't know everything about you. We have a platform of data that becomes interesting when you aggregate it."

"We've got small team in Manchester, but not at MediaCity," he said. "Having seen the offices here, I don't think we'd need too much persuading. I don't think we'd say no to coming here. We just haven't got around to it yet."

He drew an impressively-sized audience - perhaps not surprising given that Google draws in around 3bn users a month worldwide, and is second only to Facebook for global traffic.

There were lots of interesting stats and numbers being thrown around. How about this one: around 48 hours is uploaded to Youtube, which Google owns, every minute.

Brittin claims the world's five billion smartphone users will become a larger user of the web than the two billion who currently access it through a computer.

He said the whole Google ethos was "fast and happy" - find things quickly and give people the right information, especially info that's local and relevant.

He also said the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made the firm realise that people were searching for news via a search engine just as much as they were for information about where they could buy or find things.

Google doesn't want to be "the world's brain", however, nor does the company know everything about us, according to Brittin. "We don't know everything about you," he said. "We have a platform of data that becomes interesting when you aggregate it.

"Google is essentially a maths project. It was two or three years before any money came in and the main rival is always two or three people in a garage coming up with the next big thing. It's not Microsoft or Facebook."

That's not strictly true of course - Google Plus has been set up to rival the traditional social media sites, including Zuckerberg and co.

The firm is also taking on a big building in East London which it wants to turn into a hub for digital creative firms.

But Brittin said the challenges for Google, and pretty much everyone else in internetland, is how to grapple with the growth of mobile technology, and he also said the search was "far from finished".

"We're doing a lot of experimenting and failing," he said. "We wouldn't be an innovation company if we weren't."