Most people think that Google is a search engine. Think again! The search engine is how the Google empire started and even though the search engine is hugely popular, it is just one of 60 services offered by Google. Here are the top 5.

Gmail
Google’s email is free – like all the best things in life. Gmail has an uncluttered user interface and mails are retrieved on the basis of tags in stead of folders. This way a single email can have several tags and consequently belong to several categories. Very handy.

You get over two gigabytes of storage, a contacts system and integration with Google Calendar and Google Talk. And how does Google pay for all this? Well, text ads are included.

Personalized search
Google’s personalized search is an expansion of their regular search page. This is done by hallmark Web 2.0 technologies: AJAX and RSS. In the top left corner is a link to “Add more to this page”. You can add all kinds of content, from jokes to Bible verses, from stock charts to football scores. We especially like to have a view of our Gmail inbox.

You can also add content by RSS from your favorite blogs by clicking “Add by URL” right next to the search box.

Blogger
On Blogger you can make your own blog for free. Blogger is easy to use and in 3 steps you are up and running. You can choose from a number of templates — some colorful and fun, some serious and business like. If you know a little HTML ans CSS you can change the look and feel of your blog as you like.

Blogger has some additional convenient features. A plugin lets you publish directly from Word. Blogger is also integrated with Picasa, Google’s tool for editing and sharing images, so publishing images to your blog is easy.

Blogger is a great tool for non-professional blogging. However, if you plan to make blogging a part of your work, you should set up your own blogging software on your own server, in order to get full control over the database and the domain name. You never know, you may need to move it somewhere else in the future.

Desktop
Google Desktop is an application that lets you search your computer for emails, web history, text and Office files, news and photos. The search part is done from a page that looks like a lot Google’s regular search page, but it searches your own computer as well as the web.

It is fast and precise and beats the crap out of the default Windows search tool. Google Desktop also has a sidebar where you can add all kinds of gadgets or tools.

Analytics
Google bought Urchin, a tool for web site statistics and analysis, only to make it freely available online. This is not a tool for recreational bloggers, but for serious webmasters, and it tells you how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. Google Analytics contains all kinds of professional tools for tracking and analyzing web site traffic.

Note that Google Analytics is an online service. You add some code to your web pages and ask Google to keep track of your traffic. This means that Google will get access to all your traffic log data. It is all a question of trust, of course, but some companies may be a bit uncomfortable with this.

Coming attractions
Some of Google’s services are very promising, but not yet mature. This goes for the web based text editor Writely. It is a free, online full blown text editor which will let you access your documents from any computer with Internet access. It is still in Beta, though, and has some bugs and quirks. There is also an online Google spreasheet.

For other coming attractions from Google, take a look at Google Labs. This is where Google’s engineers try out new ideas.

Google bloopers
Everything Google touches does not turn into gold. Some of their services flop, like the social networking service Orkut, which is virtually unknown in most parts of the world, but is a great hit in Brazil.

Then there is Google Base, a database where you can add items and attributes and have them show up on Google. It has no clearly defined objective — you can post absolutely all kinds of items from job offers to people profiles and recipes. It is not widely used and there is no quality control of merchants or goods like on eBay.

Google Bookmarks is another blooper. It is an online bookmarking tool, but compared with other bookmark tools out there like del.icio.us, Simpy and others, it lacks the social aspect. And when you add bookmarks to your personalized Google page, the bookmark tool doesn’t even retrieve bookmarks saved on Google Bookmarks.