Google's motto is "don't be evil". It's a mantra that's served them quite well over the last ten years, as they've moved at a meteoric rate from being mere upstarts in the search engine business (then dominated by the likes of Yahoo, Lycos, and Altavista) into the nearest thing the internet has to a God. Of course, the bigger they get, the harder it is for them to not be seen as evil by default. Power corrupts, after all - and the idea of a single company controlling, however benevolently, so much of what we do online seems inherently... creepy. They already direct most people to most parts of the internet, they've taken on email, advertising, mapping, and later this year they'll start to infiltrate mobile phones with their Android operating system (a competitor to the likes of Symbian, Windows Mobile, and of course the Iphone). These days, every new inch of Google growth tends to set a few more alarm bells ringing. Imagine if Google bought Facebook - the sales of tin foil hats would double overnight.

Stand back everyone, the new search engine that will topple Google from its lofty perch has arrived. "Cuil" (pronounced "cool", or perhaps "kewl") has been created by ex-Google programmers, and claims to have improved technology behind it which better understands the context of results it delivers, and all that kind of thing. Of course, being better than Google and actually replacing Google in people's bookmarks are two very different things, but there are murmurs that this one might be in with a shot.

I know I'm a little late to the party on this one, but Gmail's good isn't it? Or at least Googlemail is - that's how it's known to us Brits since some pesky British email service (which just happened to be called Gmail) got uppity about Google's choice of name.

Not content with offering every service under the sun, (including speeding up the net, Google have been purchasing and licensing large amounts of unused fiber optic network across the US, and building lots of data centers along it.