Google to offer gigabyte of free e-mail

Google, the company that made off with the search market, is setting its sights on free e-mail.

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., on Thursday launched a test with about 1,000 invited guests set to try out a new e-mail service called "Gmail."

Google, which made its name in search but has added numerous services, such as a news aggregation page and a newsgroup interface, says that Gmail is search-based e-mail.

Like Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail, Gmail will let users search through their e-mail. Unlike those competitors, though, Google will offer enough storage so that the average e-mail account holder will never have to delete messages.

Hotmail currently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit.

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.

"The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever," said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. "You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past."

When asked whether Gmail represented further evidence that Google is muscling in on the turf of Yahoo, MSN and other Web portals, Rosing demurred.

"The way we'd like to say it," he said, "is that part of our mission is to organize and present all the world's information, and e-mail's part of that information that currently is not well organized. That is the rubric under which we offer this."

But one analyst said that Google's e-mail service should be able to siphon some consumers away from the company's rivals, given the level of storage and the proposed functionality.

"There is no doubt that (Google) will be able to take market share from Yahoo and Hotmail," said Hellen Omwando, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "You also have to consider that most people now maintain more than one e-mail address, so it wouldn't be surprising to see (Gmail) grow quickly."

But some consumers may be turned off by the contextual advertising system, Omwando said. Google has indicated that it will use an automated system to scan for frequently used terms in creating its contextual ads, with some intervention from humans to censor or adjust certain keywords.

"Google will have to tread carefully with this concept as people tend to use Web-based e-mail accounts for personal activity," she said. "Advertisers might be skittish at first and wait to see of the idea is accepted before jumping onboard."

The analyst also pointed out that, although Gmail remains in a beta format, the service does lack some functionality offered by rivals such as Yahoo, such as the ability for users to access multiple e-mail accounts from one central account.

Google is wary of announcing a launch date for the service until beta testing is complete, but according to Kate Burns, managing director of Google UK's ad sales, it will be widely available to consumers fairly soon.

"My feeling is that we have already done an awful lot of testing, so it will be a limited test period--a matter of weeks," Burns said.

News.com's Matt Hines and Michael Parsons of ZDNet UK contributed to this report.

[attisb]

Will be hard to make public

The idea sounds great but when/if it launches they will have to come up with some way to make money as it does not seem sound to offer a service like this for free.

Dont underestimate Google

You probably would have said something similar a few years ago, if I described to you then Google's free services of today. Google offers web search, newsgroups, news, image search and now a shopping service. And quality of these services is simply unmatched. Even I would have thought that you would have to charge for this many services at this quality level a few years ago.

Economics of the service are sound

Apparently Google calculated their storage costs at about $2 a Gig. So there isn't much more cost than the regular search page. Downloads of attachments will cost something of course, but Google ought to have no problem making that up in advertising.

[lagringa98]

how they will pay

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&e=1&u=/pcworld/20040401/tc_pcworld/115493
They are going to sell advertisments....

Its possible for Google

The compression technique that Google uses on its storage devices is one of the most advanced types & more than effective. Thus Google has many terabytes of unused disk space for which they don't have any idea as to how to use it.

Also, its being projected that all outgoing eMails from GMail will be scanned by an automated bot & Google will place ads in them according to the context of the content.

This will boost its ad sales sky high.

It MUST be quite profitable

It must be quite profitable, since they must get quite a lot of clicks on their ads (they all have something to do with what you're reading). And if you think well, 1GB is not that expansive for them. A HD with 120GB costs, in stores, not more than $140. That means each new user, if they ever get to use the 1000MB, costs to Google nearly a dollar (it's good to remember that it's a singletime cost, not monthly nor yearly). If each click on a text Ad cost $0.10, they'd only need about 10 clicks of each user to cover up their investments, and let's face it, each user gives Google's Ads much more than 10 clicks in a reasonably small time.

My Opinion --GMail -- wish ko lng totoo.

Definitely this involves money, why would I offer a free email over the entire public Internet users and take note with 1 GB mail box? Obviously,their agenda for this offering is "how to broadcast their advertisements"... This offering is fine as long as they can handle it and my mails are secured...

Gmail from Google

Brilliant move. If they can manage to allow a process where existing e-mail and folders and address books can get sucked in to this one, and an update to address book entries about the new e-mail id, then this is a winner. I just hope this is NOT an April Fool's joke. That will be a total loser joke.

Very useful for some of us

As someone who keeps moving around from one part
of my medical training to another, this would be a very
useful service. Being able to keep archives of the
thousands of e-mails I cannot get rid of is nearly
impossible on any web-based service. But using my
university account, I have to forward everything and
start all over as I move to my next position.

It would be fantastic to have a central account to have
e-mail from my other 8-10 e-mail accounts forwarded
to. Bravo, Google. Now how in the world does one get
one of those nifty invites.....?

I smell an April Fool's joke

This sounds like an April Fool's joke if I've ever heard one...

If it's a joke, the media bought it

Like Brad, I got a whiff of what smelled like an AFJ. The news hit my inbox courtesy of Google News Alert and I read the email. The signs were all there: the link (gmail.google.com) provided in the Google press release went to their directory page; the release had this subhead - "Search is Number Two Online Activity -- Email is Number One; 'Heck, Yeah,' Say Google Founders."

But Business Wire approved it for issue and Reuters and other media ran stories. I guess we'll see tomorrow!

[GO ILLINI]

nope ;)

its still here!