Google's dominance in world wide web is unquestionable, but how many us know how to leverage its widespread services to the fullest for our own benefit?

Many small business owners get overloaded with so much information that it can get overwhelming at times, on the other hand ignoring or delaying it won't do good for business either. This is where Google Applications come in handy, there are many such apps that can help merchants in streamlining information and processes.

Although Google has some very popular applications among small business owners like Google Adsense, Google Checkout or Google Custom Search Engine etc. but here we are going to talk about those applications that can help merchants in getting the right information at the right time.

With 'keywords' being the most integral part in search engine optimization, this application enables you to choose such words/terms that you consider important for your business.When you sign up for Google Alerts, you will be asked to enter search term(s), type of alert (news, groups, updates, web or blogs) and your email id. You can also customize the frequency of the alerts (daily, weekly or monthly).

So how does this help you? Well, with this you can very conveniently keep a close track as to what others have to say about your business, you can also get news alerts as soon as they are on the net, you can learn more and more about your competitors, you can find when people link back your site and also discover new websites or blogs. All this information, as per 'your' requirements.

All those who have been using this application will agree when I say that this is one of the best way to learn about the traffic on your site/blog. It opens up a world of information that will help you in understanding the visitors that land on your site. The bifurcation is such that you can very easily analyse the demographics of your visitors, most popular keywords, most popular page, least popular page, bounce rate, page views, visitor loyalty, the time spent on your site, traffic sources, Adwords, popular campaigns, also the browser used to view your site and many many more features for a detailed insight for your site.

Although the information is very detailed and large, but once you get the hang of it you will get hooked on to it. Its like the graphs, pie charts, maps and various comparisons are talking to you and telling you the truth about your site.

This is perhaps the most underestimated Google application, this calendar lets you do just about everything that you need to do with a calendar. You can set up tasks, reminders and even create an event (something like Facebook Events). You can easily share the calendar with your team or colleagues; even if they are sitting in a far away continent; it can be public and shared on your website as well.

Another interesting feature is that you can manage more than one calendar within a common interface, with each calendar having different management settings. So basically, you can have different calendars for different purpose like work, home, vacations or game schedule of your favorite team. You can enable reminders, which can be viewed not only on your calendar page but also as an email or text message on your phone.

Everyone has their set of favorite sites or blogs, and it sure is very time consuming to visit each and every one of them separately. Reader allows you to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds, which helps you in managing feeds from your favorite sites/blogs; it also allows you to label and share your feed collection.

Just like any other Google's application, this one also has various features and options which allows you to fiddle around as per your requirements. Apart from tagging, sorting and organizing individual items and label, the application also allows navigating through keyboard shortcuts. The only shortcomings in this application are that it does not allow you to annotate items and reads only public feeds, if you have subscribed to private feeds you will not be able to view them.