Google has so many different products that it becomes pretty hard to keep track of them over time. Some are worth being reminded of, though, because there are several useful Google products that are flying below the radar, unknown to the vast majority of users out there.

How do we know this? A couple of weeks ago we here at Pingdom wrote about Google’s tendency to keep many of its products in perpetual beta, and while doing the research for that post we kept finding Google products that we either didn’t know about or had forgotten that they existed.

So, we decided to share these with you.

This post lists 10 interesting Google products that you are likely to either have forgotten about or simply never knew existed.

Google Mobilizer

Via the Google Mobilizer page you can make any Web page mobile-friendly.

Audio Ads

A radio advertising program available through the AdWords interface. It reaches 1,600 FM and AM radio stations in the US.

Mashup Editor

An editor incorporating syntax highlighting and debugging for creating Web mashups and simple applications.

Ride Finder

A taxi, limousine and shuttle search service that uses the real-time position of vehicles in 14 US cities. It uses the Google Maps interface and any car service that wishes to participate.

Accessible Search

A specialized search engine for the blind and visually impaired that prioritizes accessible web sites.

Movies

A specialized search engine for finding film show times near a user-defined location as well as film reviews compiled from several different sources.

SMS

A text messaging service that Google offers in several countries, including the US, Japan, Canada, India and China. It lets you send search queries and receive results via SMS.

Gapminder

An online application for viewing data trends for countries and geographic regions in an interactive, visual manner.

Special Searches

Search within these special topics: Linux, BSD, Apple Macintosh, Microsoft, or the US Government.

GOOG-411

Google’s directory assistance service, available free of charge from any telephone in the US and Canada.

These products are just the tip of the iceberg. You can view a list of Google’s regular products here and Google Labs products here, and then there’s the list of Google products on Wikipedia to round things off. Happy browsing, there’s a LOT to go through!

The question is if even Sergey Brin and Larry Page are able to keep track of all the Google products out there…

Any other cool or useful, almost unknown Google products that you like but we didn’t include here? Let us know in the comments!

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Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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