Has anyone seen my search algorithm?

Google is growing too quickly and has become "disorganised" as a result, according to the company's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"Every time we double in size the company completely changes, and we've done that a lot of times now," Page told The Independent. "We are also pretty disorganised; that's part of our culture."

Page admitted that Google is aware of the problem and is working to reign things back in.

"We are a little over the edge right now in terms of our disorganisation, but in six months we will probably have it fixed," he said.

One of the areas that has raised concerns is in the company's creative thinking policy. Google encourages its engineers to spend 20 per cent of their time - one day a week - thinking about something other than their main project.

However, a recent internal audit found that this had gone a little too far and that engineers were spending too long on these side projects.

Staff were spending only 60 per cent of their time working to improve search results, and Google plans to monitor this closely in the next few months.