Today, the software giant based in Mountain View, California, offers a whole range of services such as the personalized homepage iGoogle and the instant messenger Google Talk.

The search engine giant also brings people together and with Orkut, a social network that enjoys great popularity in India and Brazil. Many new ventures and offers such as Google Sky or the 3D tool SketchUp did not find favor with the company, at first glance. But if Google finds an external project interesting, it whips out its money bags without hesitation. For instance, the company paid US$ 1.65 billion for YouTube and 3.1 billion for the online marketer DoubleClick, a company that records information about web users' browsing habits: a controversial acquisition that gave a lot of data privacy advocates a stomach ache. Only recently, less popular projects like Lively, a virtual chat room with on-screen humanoid characters, have been shut down for cost-cutting reasons.

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All these projects exist because through them, Google gets a whole pile of information about users' surfing habits. However, what the firm intends to do with this information other than deliver targeted advertisements remains a secret. Many concerns have been raised about privacy issues, but the controversial company's offerings are attracting more and more users who don't seem to mind.

All in all, Google has changed the web like no other company or competitor has managed to do, even making headway against older giants like Microsoft, with free online versions of commercial software such as Microsoft Office, or the brow'ser Chrome which takes on the might of Internet Explorer. Even a full Google OS has been rumored for years. The only thing the all-knowing search engine can't tell us is what to expect from the company itself in the future!