Unless you're just off the shuttle from Alpha Centauri, you're already aware of the product that made Google famous: its Search box. It's become the card catalog for the Internet (and a whopping moneymaker for Google).

But any time you cram about 20,000 of the world's smartest people into one company, you can expect to grow a garden of unrelated ideas. Especially when you give some of those geniuses one day off a week - Google's famous "20 percent time" - to work on whatever projects fan their passions. And especially when you create Google Labs (labs.google.com), a Web site where the public can kick the tires on half-baked Google creations. Some Labs projects go on to become real Google services, and others are quietly snuffed out.

Such innovations - and a number of smart acquisitions - have led to hits like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar and others.

But the company has also cultivated a vast jungle of lesser- known features. Unfortunately, it's so vast and varied, you would need a professional tour guide to help you find the gems.

Hello, my name is David. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

iGoogle. Google.com became famous for its white, minimalist look. It loaded quickly in the days when dial-up modems ruled the earth.

Today, at iGoogle (www.google.com/ig), you can dress up all that white space with useful mini-boxes containing additional info. Hundreds of useful displays are available: a clock, local weather, movie listings, incoming e-mail, news, daily horoscope, to-do list, Twitter updates and whatever-of-the-day (joke, vocabulary word, quotation, Bible verse, photo and so on).

The best part: this stuff doesn't slow you down. You can type in and execute a quick Google search before all those widgets have appeared.

Google Reader. Why spend your time finding and navigating to the Web sites that cover your favorite topics? They can all come to you - all nicely congregated on a single page, called Google Reader. Technically, Reader (reader.google.com) is what is called an RSS feed reader, but you don't need to know that.

You just type in a topic, inspect the search results and click the Subscribe buttons that look interesting. After that, Reader displays the first paragraph from each site or blog; click to read more. Star the items you want to read later, or pass along your favorites to friends. Fantastic.

Flu Trends. One of Google's geniuses figured out that whenever people get sick, they use Google to search for more information. By collating these searches, Google has created an early-warning system for flu outbreaks in your area, complete with color-coded graphs.