Google Eyes New Email Service, Expansion

GillBates0 writes "According to a CNN/Reuters story, Google is developing a service to attach its lucrative keyword-based advertising to email: ''I'm sure Google is getting more and more concerned about locking in users. It wouldn't surprise me if they did something very sophisticated with e-mail,' said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who tracks the industry.' Apparently, Google has purchased an e-mail management software maker and registered the domain name googlemail.com. The article also speculates that Google is slowly on the way to becoming a full-fledged portal, with the gradual addition of more and more portal-like features like Froogle."

Comments

Google does it again...

[danielrm26]

I for one am dumping (or at least sidelining) my other webmail accounts immediately if "googlemail" has the features I need. When is the last time you saw Google down?

At the moment, they can do little wrong in my eyes, and I thouroughly expect to enjoy anything coming out of their company. I just hope that as they grow into the beast they are sure to become that they don't lose the purity and creativity that sets them apart from the rest.

Improve your Google efficiency:
http://www.dmiessler.com/google

Froogle

[Rkane]

I don't know about any of you, but "Froogle" hasn't impressed me yet. I am a frequent user of pricewatch and techbargains, and Froogle hasn't even come close to matching these. Call me old fashioned, but I sincerely hope that google stays away from the portal business.

The near future.......?

[bc90021]

You log into your GoogleMail account, and it has emailed you an entire evening's worth of web crawling for the data you were looking for. It's searched for places for your for your next vacation, and has managed to provide you with not only information, but Froogle'd for the best prices too. It's suggested things you'd like to do, and gone out and found the most popular sites about that as well. All you have to do is log into your Google HomePage and accept its suggestions, or negotiate with your own little GoogleBot for other venues.

Could this be the beginning of intelligent software agents? It would seem that if anyone could bring such a thing to us, it would be the Google folks...

Portals

[FooAtWFU]

So what's wrong if Google becomes a portal? I certainly see enough people complaining about it. As long as the search engine still works pretty well...
As for "locking in" users, I would hardly compare this to the wonderful lock-in schemes we've seen out of Redmond.
Google email... would that mean that they parse my text and attach a keyword-based ad to it? :)

Google continues to expand their services but...

[HMA2000]

Is it just me or does it seem like google is getting further and further away from what they are good at (excellent search results) and closer and closer to a Yahoo type service?

I am sure the money must be great for introducing services like these but aren't they canabalizing their value by introducing these new services while at the same time polluting their search results?

Then again...

[loserbert]

...all of this could be driven by the fact that they are working on an IPO.

They may be the kindest, gentlest search engine and downright good people, but cash is cash. Everybody wants more. More features means more users means more money.

Google needs help

[DRue]

Google is still on top of the market. But, more and more often I am getting bad results from a search. By bad results I mean that instead of getting the best site, I get the most commercial site.

I would really like google to get a feature that instead of listing the name and summary of a web page, lists JUST the domains of returned results. i.e. if I search for "mp3 player", i get back
www.apple.com
www.rio.com
www.othermp3play er.com

--- not buying google IPO

Anyone else having trouble with google?

[Denver_80203]

Seems like in the last few months, Google searches have turned up other "search engines" as a top result or 4 out of the top 5. So, as an example, I search for "foo" and most of the top results lead me to another (crappy) google like site with it's own results for "foo". The feeling I get from those sites is similiar to those crappy sites you end up on when mis-spelling a URL.

Re:Interesting things at google.

[LnxAddct]

On the other side of things, Google stands to make a killing here. Google can sell a new class of ads to people like plumbers, who don't need a webpage.

Back a few months ago I was developing software and the question arose as to whether or not it'd be best to charge for the software or to include ads in it (i.e. Kazaa). It was concluded that Kazaa like ads were too intrusive and text based ads would be appropriate. I emailed Google about whether or not their AdWords could be used in a software environment and they said not at the current moment, but its a possibility for the future. The guy was real nice and forwarded the idea onto some more people inside Google. Personally I think that text based ads would be perfect for situations where you can't open source your project, but you can't (or don't want to)charge for it either, but still want to make profit. For example, you could place a nice little unobtrusive text ad at the bottom of your menus or something. Who knows, maybe we'll see google coming out with this kind of feature in the future.
Regards,
Steve

Bad move

[Krafty Koder]

it's a bad bad move on google's part. The infrastructure needed (and the sysadmin) to provide a robust, spam-free , web based email system is of a sheer magnitude greater than just being pure search.
For starters , the tech support will ramp up ,and add to google's costs. And Googlemail will become the numero uno target for spammers.
If I were the Google founders, I quite honestly wouldn't bother - it's to much hassle and dilutes the Google "brand".
But then again, the IPO is coming up, so having a "webmail" component is an easy sell to "analysts" in Five Points ...ahem... Wall Street I mean.

WARNING: post is plagiarized

[Gzip Christ]

The parent post was copied verbatim from a Slashdot post from last year. The parent poster is karma whoring. Check out his posting history for other examples of this.

Re:Well Actually

[soothsayer491]

I have to say that I used to be a member of this service called Bluebottle, it did everything that shadango does and more....even POP access, then it got abused to no end and now it sucks! But yea so now I'm on the shadango train as well it's solid. Here is what i like:

• You can check all POP/IMAP accounts from one interface(even yahoo, hotmail, and aol(and they're filtered!))
• Realtime access to your IMAP accts
• 20MB of space for each address you have
• Calender
• You can make "disposable" addresses
• The customer service they have is unbeatable...unlike the big corps like yahoo!
• There's no annoying ads on the site!
• Lastly, they keep making improvements, very active development

I just hope that it can stick around and not go down the road that bluebottle did!

That's my two cents

Willie

Re:Oy.

[instarx]

I agree. Google results are becoming more and more irrelevant, with the first page of hits being taken up by a few major eCommerce organizations. This is mostly the result of abuse by a few companies working the Google algorithms since most of the ads are really for the same service, just using different web pages linked to each other. There must be a term for this but I don't know it.

I am very tired of clicking link after link that purport to have reviews of what I am looking for only to discover it has nothing of the sort and is just another version of Amazon, Nextag, OneCall or Yahoo or with exactly the same information. It particularly irks me to be tricked to a site that that claims a "Review of Acme Rocket Launcher" that just says, "Sorry there are no reviews of Acme Rocket Launcher submit your review here, but get best price for Acme Rocket Launcher here."

No, Google doesn't do everything perfectly by a long shot.