Google Tools
Google provides a growing number of different web tools, some useful and some not so useful. Here is a quick comment on some of them.
Search
My Rating: 
Probably the best search engine currently available. It produces links to useful pages at the top of the search results most of the time. Yoy do need to have some idea of what to search for but that is true of all search engines.
AdSense
My Rating: 
The most effective advertising that I have found. It produces a reasonable income without being to obtrusive on the page and so hopefully doersn't annoy too many visitors. Google staff are even prepared to make suggestions on how to reorganise the ads on your pages to increase that profit provided that you are making enough from them to start with to make it worthwhile for them to do so.
Maps
My Rating:
A powerful application with plenty of opportunity for you to customise it to suit your needs. A high learning curve to actually figure out how to use it most effectively plus it is of limited use for many web sites where maps are not often needed.
Analytics
My Rating:
I have seen many good comments about this tool which is supposed to gather the best statistics on who is visitong your web pages. Maybe I haven't had it running for long enough but from what I can see the stats it captures are very poor indeed. If it weren't for the Flash charts I probably would have awarded a higher score.
GMail
My Rating:
The worst of the Google tools I have looked at so far - this tool uses an antiquated browser sensing JavaScript for its core functionality which breaks as soon as you change the browser useragent (which is after all a free format field) to anything other than the default for the browser. On top of that when I tried it I ended up with nothing in my inbox and all my wanted emails mixed in with the junk in the spam folder.
