Last week, we discovered some great free services courtesy of search engine powerhouse Google. Now, in this second and final installment, we'll dig into a dozen more Google services and tools.

But, first, let's look at what's changed with Google over the past several months. First off, and happily, Gmail accounts are no longer by invitation only. You can sign up for a free email account, with over a gigabyte of storage space, at https://gmail.google.com. And POP mail is supported now too, not just Web mail.

The Google Toolbar is now a bit more browser-agnostic. No longer just for Internet Explorer for Windows, the Google Toolbar now works on Firefox for the PC, Mac, or Linux. Download it from https://toolbar.google.com.

Google Web Alerts and Google News Alerts have been combined into one service, termed Google Alerts. It provides automated, free monitoring of search results in Google and/or Google News and is available at https://www.google.com/alerts.

Google Groups 2 Beta has graduated out of beta and replaced the original Google Groups. Email-based discussion-group functionality is now seamlessly integrated with Usenet newsgroup functionality. Search, browse, or participate on Usenet newsgroups or email lists. Or start your own email discussion list for free.

Now are you ready for a plethora of amazing Google services and tools?

Google Desktop Search

If you are looking for a powerful search application to install on your PC that will search all your Outlook emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, instant messages, previously viewed Web pages, and more, then you need go no further than Google's Desktop Search tool.

Google Desktop Search is available to download from https://desktop.google.com. It only works on a PC running Windows XP and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above. It is a simple, painless installation process. After installation, Google Desktop search begins indexing all the files on your hard drive. Quite cleverly, Google integrates Desktop Search results along with Web search results, as you can see from the screenshot. Google Desktop also comes with the Sidebar, a handy little widget that continuously displays on your desktop personalized information such as news headlines, RSS feeds, sticky notes, weather, photos, real-time stock quotes, new email messages, maps, and frequently used files and a quick-find feature that lets you launch programs with a few keystrokes. An example Sidebar is depicted at right.

Google Print

Google Print is a massive initiative from Google to digitize much of the world's printed information. To use Google Print, perform an ordinary Google search. When Google finds digitized books with relevant content, those books will be listed in a "book results" section near the top of the search results page. By clicking on the book title, you can view the page of the book that contains your search terms, as well as other information about the book. You can also display up to two pages before and after the page of the book.

Try a search for books about Ecuador trekking to see Google Print in action. Books have already been submitted by more than a dozen publishers, including Penguin, Wiley, Hyperion, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge, Chicago, Oxford, Princeton, and Scholastic. For now, only English-language books will be indexed, with other languages to be added later.

Google Print marks a monumental shift for Google from being an indexer of the world's knowledge Web to a builder of it as well, as noted recently by industry pundit John Battelle. You can learn more about the Google Print program at https://print.google.com.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar, available at https://scholar.google.com, allows one to search through scholarly literature, including articles from peer reviewed academic journals. Google has worked with publishers to gain access to subscription-only content that wouldn't ordinarily be accessible to search spiders.

Although the full content of the article may only be available to subscribers of that journal, Google requires that the publishers provide at least abstracts to Google Scholar searchers. Search results displayed in Google Scholar each have a "cited by" link; when clicked on, it will show you all the citations to that document in the scholarly literature that Google Scholar knows about.

Google Local

This is a great tool if you need to find local businesses or services in the US, Canada, and some select cities abroad, or if you want to geographically explore a region. It's especially handy when you're hunting for restaurants within spitting distance.

Search using location names such as toronto, addresses such as 931 e. main st, madison, wi, type of business such as pizza, or a combination of the above such as hotels near lax. And you can get driving directions, lax to 92780 for instance. Even conduct keyword searches that are restricted to the map region displayed on your screen.

Google returns phonebook listings with associated Web pages on the left, and on the right the top results are all pinpointed on the map. Apparently, Google has already put its acquisition of Keyhole to good use, as the map interface allows you to toggle between street maps, satellite images, and a hybrid view of both. And you can smoothly pan around and zoom without the slow page reloading of other mapping services. A very cool service, it's available at https://local.google.com.