Google+ has had a strange trajectory as a service. It began life as a sort of me-too social network from the company that was also responsible for the ignominious Buzz, though unlike Buzz, it actually had some redeeming qualities. As time has gone on, Google+ has slowly grown outward to augment or replace many of Google's other services, from Search to Hangouts (née Talk) to YouTube. Google's Steve Grove gave some telling (if unsurprising) comments to Mint yesterday that drive home just how central Google+ is to the company's future efforts.

"We’ve been consolidating the different services, so today Search, YouTube, the Google Play app store, all this plugs into Google+," said Grove. "And the reason for that is that Google+ is kind of like the next version of Google. And mobile is key to this; we’re seeing a lot of activity on mobile now. There’s a lot of great value here, because Search also shows results from Google+, and this is going to bring more people into Google+; people are going to see that there’s a lot of value in logging into our services before doing a search."

These statements shouldn't astonish anyone who has been paying attention—Google has been beating the Google+ integration drum for quite some time. From Google's perspective, pooling all of the data the company has about you can help it target its services toward you, making them more valuable to you and, as a convenient side effect, increasing the amount of time you spend using Google's services and viewing Google's ads. Some of the company's other arguments in favor of combining everything don't hold as much water, though.

"Comments, YouTube comments, were a big problem, it was a wasteland," said Grove. "The fact is that the username, JellyBean407, that’s a very different mindset, and the person who’s making the comment, they would never troll with their real name."

There may be a subset of trolls who don't want their Internet activity associated with their real name, but Google+ integration has hardly eliminated trolling or ASCII art genitalia from YouTube comment threads. Still, we can expect Google to continue bringing more data into the service even if it doesn't always have the intended effects—the benefits for Google's business model are simply too large to ignore.