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I'm normally not the type of person who is forever being paranoid ... really I'm not ... and I've got a piece of paper from a nice friendly doctor to prove it ... but there's something about the way that Google is behaving lately that has me bothered.

Hell, bothered is an understatement ... Google really has me worried because they're just being way too nice to us webmasters. Remember this is the Google that used to run major updates at the worst possible times for small online businesses ... this is the Google that used to kick you out of their listing without telling you why ... and this is the Google that wants you to believe that they do no evil ... no matter how much they may like to change the meaning of the word.

So how are they being nice to us webmasters? Well there's Google Analytics for a start. Google bought out a company a year or two back that was developing a great analytics program ... one that you had to pay for ... and then gave it to us for free.

Well it wasn't exactly free even though it doesn't cost webmasters any money to use. The cost to us is that if we want to use Google Analytics then we have to let Google see our stats and to use them ... in a non-identifying way of course ... to develop their knowledge of what people are doing online.

Then there's Webmaster Central ... that great place where you can tell Google that you actually own your sites and in return they'll give you some great statistics, allow you to geo-target your site if that's what turns you on and help you with site maps, robots.txt files and even tell you if there's a problem with any part of your sites.

Heck they'll even email you if they're about to kick you out of the index and invite you to apply for re-inclusion once you've fixed whatever the problem was that got them upset in the first place.

Now if those tools weren't helpful enough then we Google gave us Google Trends ... an interesting tool that provides us with ... in general terms and with limited accuracy ... an idea of how popular a search term might be. Google would even tell you in which countries the term was most popular. Even though it only provides data in general terms Google Trends can be very helpful when you're research keywords and keyword phrases.

So all that was enough to get me worried but now it really is paranoia time because Google hasn't stopped there. Now they've gone and released another interesting free tool that lets you compare your website with any other website you care to think about. Once again this tool is free and it can be very helpful indeed.

You'll find that tool at http://trends.google.com/websites and it certainly is an interesting one to play with. It can also be quite deflating when you compare your site to one that you might consider to be a competitor. When Steve did that with one of his mainstream sites he got to find out just how in front his competitor was.

Never mind Steve, he's not doing any better job of monetizing his site than you are ... but he was such a long way in front as far as traffic is concerned.

So while Steve goes off to sulk let me warn you that using this latest tool from Google could be a little bruising for your ego ... or even a little deflating ... but then, when you're doing business online isn't it better to know the truth about how your site compares to your competitors' sites?

Well maybe it is ... or maybe it isn't ... I'll leave that up to you to decide.

But whether it is or it isn't ... I'm still worried about Google. Just why is it that suddenly Google wants to be our friend and give us heaps of free tools that can make our life so much easier ... even if some of them do some serious damage to our egos along the way?

Perhaps it's a dastardly plot on the part of Google to do some serious harm to as many webmasters as it can while appearing to be more wholesome than Grandma's apple pie.

And now I'm off for an overnight trip down to the state capital. I've got some meetings planned and some stock to buy for one of our mainstream online shops as well. It's also a chance just to have a break away from the office and the computers for a little while and, as you can see, I probably need it.