Google, as we all know, is the goliath whose massive growth is spreading across the internet, eating up all that's in its way, as it launches one new service after the next.

Except, in important ways it's not.

For all Google's growth and the flood of new products, users still see it primarily as a search engine, not as the emerging portal fancied by analysts to challenge Yahoo and MSN.

No less important, users continue to use Google primarily for search, largely passing over such newer services and Gmail and Google Finance. If they are aware of them, they're not all that interested.

That's the finding of new research from Hitwise, the internet research firm. Consumers, the research shows, see Google primarily as a brand that helps people locate things, and that's not changing. Interestingly, that's sort of consistent with how Google continues to see itself, as a place devoted to making the world’s information more accessible.

In terms of portals, Yahoo clearly is one in consumers' eyes, while the Hitwise research found that users see MSN as a destination with certain portal characteristics but more as a place to get specific tools, such as Messenger.

As for Google and all the talk of it becoming a portal with all the new features, Heather Hopkins, vice president, research at Hitwise in Britain, all but dismisses the notion. Says Hopkins, “If consumers aren’t using Google in that way, is it a portal? Maybe not."

The Hitwise research into user perceptions of Google, Yahoo and MSN was based upon search terms, which the company believes is a good way of gauging which attributes consumers associate with a brand.

Bill Tancer, global research general manager at  Hitwise, pulled search queries in the U.S. that included the words “Google,” “Yahoo!” and “MSN” for the four weeks ending July 29. He then looked at the top 20 searches for each of the three brands (see chart, below).

Queries relating to Google were focused on searching for information, geographic location or multimedia content. This suggests that despite Google’s added tools, consumers still see the brand as one that helps people find things.

By contrast, the Yahoo queries covered a broad range of interests. “There is a clear difference when we compare Google’s terms with Yahoo’s … search versus engage in an activity or consume a specific type of content,” writes Tancer on his blog.

For its part, MSN queries were more focused on MSN tools, including the new Messenger download. Yet the search terms also revealed some portal characteristics, with user queries relating to music, games and money.  

Hitwise also looked at search terms for these three companies in Britain. The findings, while different in details, told a similar story.

The new U.S. findings would seem to match up with what Tancer found in May when he looked at U.S. traffic to these three sites. The traffic figures show that while Google sailed ahead of Yahoo! and MSN in search, it lagged behind these two players in such areas as email and finance.

Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended July 30, the top five parent companies were Microsoft at No. 1, followed by Yahoo, Time Warner, Google and News Corp., according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The top brands were Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Google, Microsoft and AOL.

GUS Plc once again retained the top spot among advertisers, delivering 7.49 million impressions to No. 2 NexTag’s 1.96 million. Time Warner was third. Yahoo served up the most ads, 18 million, followed by MySpace at 7.99 million.

Sessions remained even week to week at 16, and domains visited per person dipped to 37, one fewer than last week. Average PC time per person rose slightly to 16 hours, 15 minutes and 53 seconds for the week.