Google said Wednesday it plans to offer a free Web-based e-mail service with 1 GB of storage space, far more than rival services by Yahoo and Hotmail. It's another sign Google, traditionally known as a pure search engine, intends to compete more directly with general-purpose portals like Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN.
In addition to the huge storage capacity, Google plans to highlight its search capabilities, which would make it easier for users to search for specific information through thousands of e-mails. The service will automatically index keywords in e-mails to reduce the time it takes to search through them for information.
"You can search all of your e-mail as if it were Google," said Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering.
The service, called Gmail, won't be available to the public for a while. Instead, the company has invited about 1,000 employees, friends and family members to test it first. The trials began Thursday.
Gmail could force big changes at Yahoo and MSN. Currently, e-mail is the most popular usage of the Internet. Yahoo and MSN rely on free e-mail services to generate traffic, sign up new users and goad them to reveal personal information that attracts advertisers.
While Gmail would offer 1 GB of storage, Yahoo users receive 4 MB of storage -- just a tiny fraction of 1 percent of Google's capacity. Hotmail users receive just 2 MB. Hotmail and Yahoo users must pay to increase their e-mail storage limits.
Rosing said the company arrived at the 1 GB figure by estimating how much storage an average user would need to store up to a decade's worth of e-mail. "It's a new paradigm where you don't delete your e-mail," said Rosing. Instead, users would leave all their messages on Google's server and search through them as needed.
The free service will be supported by ads that Google automatically places in users' e-mail messages. The ads will be targeted to the readers of the messages and will correspond to the text in the messages. For instance, an e-mail message about your trouble with your DSL connection might have an ad from SBC Communications in it.
When asked if consumers would perceive the targeted ads to be a violation of their privacy, Rosing said the company's terms-of-service agreement for Gmail "says clearly that the targeting is done by machines" and that they would respect user privacy. "It takes a bit of getting used to," admitted Rosing, "but we don't see that as a problem."
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are the top contenders in a brewing fight over search-engine services. Yahoo recently dropped Google's search technology to use its own. Google has responded by updating its look and bringing more services out of its labs and into production. For example, it began highlighting Froogle, the company's shopping-catalog search feature, this week.
Microsoft, too, has redoubled its efforts to develop advanced search technologies to stave off Google.
