Submit Link To This Article or It's Content To Your Personal Blogs

Google became a household word by building better Internet search technology. But today it touches my business, NewWest.Net, in all kinds of ways that have little to do with finding things online. Google, in fact, is on the brink of becoming a sort of universal information technology utility for small businesses—a great thing, for the most part, but also a little scary.

Our first Google service (other than basic Internet search, of course) was AdSense, which distributes relevant text ads to partner Web sites and pays them a cut of the revenues. For most publishers, us included, it's not a lot of money, and we've dialed it down over time as our internal sales picked up. But the $400 to $500 a month we got from AdSense definitely helped at the beginning, and it was very interesting to see what the Google brain considered most relevant for our audience.

When we launched the company in 2005, one of the analytics programs we used to count traffic on the site was called Urchin, and it was later bought by Google and helped form the basis of Google Analytics. This is now a standard tool for measuring Web traffic. If you don't use it to see what's happening on your company Web site, you probably should.

Like most online publishers, one way in which we distribute our content is via technology called RSS, and from the start we used a free service called FeedBurner to manage this. FeedBurner was also bought by Google, so now Google manages our RSS feeds. For inbound Web traffic, meanwhile, both basic Google search and Google News are very important sources.

But just as important as these online publishing tools are the general business utilities that we now run through Google.

Just a few months ago we switched all of our company e-mail over to Google. The e-mail addresses are still @NewWest.Net and I still run it through my Apple Mail software. But Gmail's Web interface is far superior to what we had on our own server, the spam filtering is better, the backup storage is more robust, and we don't need to deal with maintenance and support. It actually does have problems occasionally—and whether Gmail is sufficiently reliable as a corporate mail service remains a matter of debate in the Internet community—but for now at least I'm happy to have this be Google's worry.

We are also now heavy users of Google Docs, which functions as our central file-sharing and file-storage facility. I've always been too cheap to buy a proper server and local area network for the office, and now we don't really need one. Google Docs can be clunky in certain ways, and it won't handle more elaborate file formats, but for sharing Word documents and spreadsheets, it's just fine. If it ultimately enabled us to dispense with Microsoft Office altogether, we could save some money there.

And what does Google charge for all these things? Nothing.

I'm not convinced that these things will be free forever, though, and that's one of the things that make me nervous. As a business strategy, it would be logical to get people locked into these things and than gradually start charging for them. On some of the services at least, it would be a big pain in the neck to switch.

As a publisher, I'm also very cognizant of the fact that Google is in some respects a competitor in that we are both chasing online advertising dollars. Further, its power in the online ecosystem is overwhelming, and it can almost make or break a site like NewWest.Net by the way it treats us in search results and in Google News. At a minimum, it has the ability to peer deeply into my business; I trust it doesn't actually do that, but still.

Google, like just about every company in the technology business, is positioning for the day, not too far in the future, when most, if not all, computing services will be delivered via the "cloud." Big server farms run by Google or Amazon or IBM will do the heavy lifting, and we'll all just plug in via our high-speed Internet connections.

For small businesses, this is almost all good: no more servers, no more expensive packaged software, no more IT guy, and a lot more capabilities. I just hope that the Google cloud isn't the only one out there.