Google has expanded from just web searches to image searches, mapping, satellite pictures of houses, even cars that take pictures of your house at street level (StreetView). To compete with Yahoo! Mail, Google later launched Gmail, who's unique method of organizing e-mails as "conversations" rivals other e-mail providers. Google even offers corporate services through Google Apps that most users don't even see - and they provide wi-fi to their hometown of Mountain View, California, distributing wireless connectivity over "nodes" mounted to lightposts around the city. They even made a web browser, Google Chrome, and are soon releasing an operating system for netbooks, the Chrome OS. And everything listed here - free. Doesn't cost their customers a dime. Everything's paid for by advertisements.

Now throw into the mix that Google is working on launching their own high speed internet service, over a fiber network that could support transfer speeds of up to 1 gigabit-per-second. Compare that to your current cable internet hookup that, according to Comcast, taps out at around 50 megabits-per-second (0.05 gigabits-per-second).

It's obviously going to be several years before Google launches this even locally to California residents, but it shows how Google is launching service after service - and doing it better than the competition. Google claims in their blog post that the fiber internet will be competitively priced, and could soon be offered to up to 500,000 users.

To see the original Google blog post, check it out here.