Brian Bershad in Seattle this morning.

The essence of Google's product strategy is to "follow the data," said the company's Seattle site director, Brian Bershad, during a presentation about the future of search at a Technology Alliance event this morning. Apart from the Web, he cited well-known examples including photos, instant messages, news, books, email and video, along with Google's related products in each of those areas.

That made me think of all the data pouring into Twitter these days, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent comments about the increasingly popular broadcast messaging service. As noted by Reuters, real-time Twitter search "could become particularly valuable to advertisers and corporations going forward, and could potentially represent a threat to Google’s search dominance."

During the Q&A session this morning, I asked Bershad if there might be an opportunity for Google to come in and make a better Twitter search.

"There's relatively little data in Twitter" compared with the rest of the Web, Bershad said. "I think if you could take a Twitter-like service and combine it with a lot of other data sources about the users, you might be able to come up with something more interesting."

Hypothetically speaking, of course, what kinds of data might a "Twitter-like service" benefit from? Bershad cited, as an example, the possibility of adding data from the recently launched Google Latitude geolocation service, which lets people broadcast their location to selected friends on mobile phones.

Before we set off a new round of speculation about potential Google product plans, Bershad was quick to add that it's "still pretty early to pontificate" on the idea of combining data in that way.

(Post updated to make it clear that Bershad was speaking about the amount of data in Twitter as compared to the Web as a whole.)