Search engines have probably made the internet accessible to the masses, now if you want to find a piece of information out you're less likely to drag the massive encyclopedia down off the shelf in favour of going to the computer and putting your query in to a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

Undoubtably Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search engines, partially because they've diversified a lot (partially because they aren't trying to buy another one of the big three search engine companies because they're struggling) but if you take the time you can make Google work for you so much better whtehter you're at home or at work there are little tweaks you can make that will make your searching more productive.

The main use people have found for iGoogle is the ability to customize howGoogle looks, in the past on certain days the Google logo can be seen to change(check some of them out on here. These themes look all well and good, by the way I prefer the Teahouse Fox theme myself!, anyway, other than the ability to change the theme of your search page there's a number of smaller tools you can add to your search page that you use most often.

These tools can be language translators or one of my favorites; a currency converter for those eBay purchases. The list doesn't stop there you can incorporate your Google Mail account into the main screen so that you can quickly see the ammount of emails you have and whether you have any new ones.

Google News is a good tool too, so you can see the headlines for whatever region you want and for whatever subject you like, so if you are in to computers for example you can tell the Google News widget to only tell you thew latest news in computers. Neat, eh?

There's a whole bunch of tools that you can add and almost everyone is jumping on the bandwagon so check out thesite's list of applicationsat thelinks below.