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.