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Google has just launched a free mobile website building tool as an extension to its existing Google Sites service. Like its big brother, which is designed to let anyone create a professional, template-driven webpage in minutes, the new mobile service is just as painless to use.

It's also completely free.

In its latest move to appeal to small and medium-sized businesses, Google has launched an online guide to getting started with Google Places and Google Sites, both of which are free tools geared toward SMBs.

Google Sites is a hosted service for building out simple, template-based sites on Google's cloud infrastructure. Business owners can choose from four templates: Restaurant or Cafe, Retail Shop or Boutique, Dentist or Doctor's Office and Spa or Salon. Site content, color scheme and fonts are customizable, and of course Sites plays nice with other Google tools like Analytics, Webmaster Tools and AdSense.

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting today, Google will provide templates that it claims makes it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets.

Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise. Employees using Google Sites may submit their own templates to a gallery, similar to the services that Sharepoint offers.

Wikis, micro-blogs and collaboration technologies get a lot of attention for their use in the enterprise but one need remains constant.

Search.

Who wins the search battle will come home with a lot of prizes and big wins in the enterprise. Search may even prove to be a differentiation for companies that are choosing collaboration platforms.

We have been hearing rumors about the Google Drive online storage service for years now. This mythical GDrive would give users the ability to easily store and access all of their files in the cloud. Lots of other services already offer this, of course, but few of them are at the center of our online lives as much as Google is. Yesterday, Google Sites, a service that lets users build their own websites without ever having to touch the HTML or CSS code, just launched an update to its unified 'insert' dialog. This dialog brings together all of your files from almost all of Google's services and looks a lot like we would imagine the GDrive to look like.

Google Sites, the Google platform for document sharing and collaboration, has been dubbed "SharePoint Light" by many members of the tech community. However, the platform might be getting a new name soon, and one that won't be so nice. Apparently, spammers have adopted Sites as a tool to host spam and malware, and, thanks to the google.com domain name, some spam filters are having trouble blocking the messages.