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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."
Just think when you get all your usual spam, it will be annotaed by keyword to other sites that sell similar crap
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
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
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
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.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
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...
libertarianswag.com
yup
couldn't agree more. google is definitely a class act. like their pop-up blocking software. it blocked 3 for me from that refdesk site.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
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?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Dear Google,
r eesexsite.com that it's becoming incredibly hard to actually get any information out of it. It used to be that when I searched for a product, you gave me user/site reviews on that product. Now, all I get is a bunch of people trying to make me buy it from them.
Instead of messing around with all this e-mail stuff, how about you concentrate on actually making your search engine useful again? It has become completely overrun with results like sony.dscp10.reviews.digital.cameras.hot.sex.now.f
Please remedy this before trying to do other things.
Thank you.
As far as I am concerned, they can start offering e-mail, or whatever. They can become as much of a portal as they want.
Just don't destroy the simplicity of their search engine's front page by tacking on all sorts of ads and images and text. The bare-bones website they offer up for searches is so much more efficient and, I feel, better for serving the purpose of what Google primarily is - a high quality search engine.
If they start tacking all sorts of crap to it, they'll become just like everyone else, and lose their uniqueness. It'll still be a high quality search engine, but without stand-out packaging.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Google's AdSense program, which allows you to get paid for ads on your website, explicitly prohibits using it in e-mail, but it may not be a big deal to start allowing that. Seems like just releasing that restriction and a little work for targeting of ads to e-mails instead of websites would mean that Google's advertising system could be applied to e-mail.
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?
2) Do one thing incredibly well? Check.
3) Do one thing so well you got MS nervous? Check.
4) Slowly expanding offerings that move more and more away from core competancy? Check.
5) Try and become everything for everyone? Check.
6) Spiral and burn?
The pencil is poised. I hope to god its not true.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Isn't this a perfect time for Google to announce such a common, easily identifible service as this than at this particular juncture? How better to prepare the investing world to sell this upcoming IPO to Main Street Techno-Neophyte Investors than to say that Google is expanding, and that they even have email services ... Plus, think about those eyeballs that will be locked into those browser-based email pages, and all the ad space that comes with them. I am a cynic, but that's just me. I'll still sign up for the service!
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
You have to wonder who google is going to get people into this. Will it be the traditional yahoo/hotmail approach where you get 5MB free and then upgrade, or prehaps they will just go fora decent free emails service ala normal ISP. Intresting to see how they make money
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
...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.
[ Don't reply to this ]
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.
y er.com
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.othermp3pla
--- not buying google IPO
The guys are at Google are so innovative, I'm sure they could come up with some spam filtering technology. They could leverage info from their USENET archive or the web.
I'm sure Google is getting more and more concerned about locking in users
It's only a lockin if the users want to leave but can't. Google has a good history with users, I wouldn't expect them to do any less with a mail client.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
Embrace and extend.
it seems to me that the more google branches out into these extra services the more the only reason for google's success - the web searching - will be lost and ignored. I really hope google doesnt become like www.yahoo.com, which is simply an eyesore and completely useless as it tries to do too much...
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
Think of it. Every spam you get from here on in would be laced with links to their own viagra, herbal diet products & work from home options. The real spammers would never have a chance.
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.
Wouldn't it be great if you could use Google to search full text all the refereed scientific journals?
That would make the internet into what it was made for, free open exchange of scientific work.
A LexusNexus Tab would kick ass to but might be a little pricey.
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
Is that really a "discussion groups" section as much as Google's newsgroup browser? It's not really a Google service as much as a Google interface to a web-wide service.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
My guess is that they will end up looking a lot like Yahoo. I think Yahoo thinks that too, since they have already announced that they want to go head to head with Google's search technology. Yahoo surely hopes that by the time Google starts registering users they will be able to convince their existing user base that there is no need to register at Google too.
I doubt it will be required to register at Google to continue to use their search. You can do a lot of things with Yahoo without setting up an ID there, it's just that you can't do anything that requires it to remember your settings, preferences, etc.
except that refdesk dont actually have any of their own content, they are just using everyone elses
thanks but iam trying to use the internet to cut out the pathetic middlemen like refdesk with their advert farms
What is sad is that most useful email addresses @google.com will be swallowed up within ten minutes of the service going live, so you'll be back to charlie055539833 or cooldude1975 as your userid there too.
Get used to Google losing its agnostic stance after it goes public. Stop thinking of Google as a round-about and more as a parking lot.
About 2 months ago I noticed that Google was down for about 3 minutes.
OMG. I thought that the world was coming to an end.
At this point, there's no need to be worried about their email-based stuff. If I had a machine to download all the mail to, I'd subscribe to their news update service...They do a Google news keyword search and email you the news results every so often. That's what I call staying up-to-date.
Here's an example link. Look at the bottom of the page.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
What is left in webmail? The best Google can do is offermore default space than Yahoo and Hotmail. This will cost them money - Yahoo currently soaks $19 a year out of anyone wanting more than 4 MB. Maybe they can do filtering better, but I don't see them outdoing spamassassin etc. Ultimately its just another email address. The geek cachet will wear off quick after everyone you despise starts using googlemail.
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. ,and add to google's costs. And Googlemail will become the numero uno target for spammers. ...ahem... Wall Street I mean.
For starters , the tech support will ramp up
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
might be similar to what you describe, but you left out something important.
The crawling that was done for you was silently biased toward Google advertising clients.
And the travel suggestions have been biased toward Google advertising clients.
Oh, and the Froogle selections also were biased toward paying ad customers.
Maybe that's all ok (legally and economically), but it's probably not what you would expect, and as such you'll be working from bad data to make your decisions.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
What would be interesting is if what Google did was release spam blocking software.
It seems to me that blocking spam, and weeding out google-exploit spam search results, are the same sort of text processing / arms race sort of problem. Research on the latter, which is what Google is working on right now, will probably lead to techniques helpful in the former. So if they're looking at expanding into email, it seems like that would be a likely area for them to expand into...
Of course, given, they aren't right now doing a good JOB of filtering out the google-exploit spam results, but I expect they'll unveil some kind of brandnamed technology attempting to deal with the problem sometime shortly before MSN's search engine is released...
I just hope if they offer email addresses, they offer some, you know, better domans. I'm sorry, I don't want to be "mcc@google.com".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You only have to register for things that have some business angle to them. Registering for adwords makes sense. Registering to post on google groups makes sense. Registering to use an email address, well you kind of need to. I sincerely doubt that you'll need to log in to search or anything though. My mom gets confused enough trying to log in to windows XP. As far as portal goes it looks like they track people based more on what they're viewing at the present time than historical stats.
Photos.
Go to google.com, then go to yahoo.com (if you're using a good browser, view them in tabs side by side). You'll notice Google has their search bar prominently in the middle of the page, surrounded by 13 links, 4 of them are for searching, 1 for the news service, 3 setup options. Also, out of the way at the bottom are links to info about the company.
Now look at yahoo, the search bar is at the top (good) but there are probably over 100 links to all of the various parts of yahoo arranged in a, *gasp*, portal like fashion.
It seems obvious that for google, searching remains job 1, while for yahoo, searching competes with the dozen other features they offer.
-Reid
In fact, they could possibly host a minimal web page for those kind of advertisers who just want to show some simple text and services.
You mean like the yellowpages?
I think that just about time Google goes IPO, it will be just a footnote in the history of the internet.
Already, google search results are MUCH WORSE than they were just a few months ago. There is so much fake ranking trickery and strange re-ranking changes on google's part that the results are nearly useless for many searches.
It's a real opening for competing search engines now that Google has taken their eys off the ball and they are wasting money playing with Froogle and news.google.com
These guys are so impressed with themselves that they are going to be very suprised when they have no money left, or worse, they are forced by their IPO backers to start even more foolish online projects -- iTunes powered by Google anyone?
take a look at Overture -- they sell a service that does exactly what you are looking for. It's easy to get keyword directed text adds included into your html dynamically from an overture server.
it's not expensive either.
offer porn. you could call it 'ogle'
... they also registered the following domain names:
googleporn.com
googlesucks.com
Can we expect better content from Google soon?
More seriously, when they register domain names, I believe it's more to prevent abuses than anything else...
There are more than 1800 domain names registered containing the google keyword.
I found a cool List of Google Features that you may or may no be aware of. Check it out.
I have never had anything but praise for Google. The "Less is More" design was an oasis compared to other yahoos. However, I have always had a Yahoo account because it is free. I'll jump to google in a heartbeat ~ as long as it's free.
Google has created more innovative search features than anyone. And they just keep doing it. People have discussed the impending or eventual doom because of new offerings from MS and Yahoo, but the mindshare is with Google and the service just rocks/folks!
I have only 1 suggestiong for Google, and that is to let me up the number results returned to 250 or 500. Other than that, I'm on the bandwagon!
Stuff that matters.
http://www.arb-forum.com/domains/decisions/114712. htm
Possibly the REAL reason they registered it...
--Proudly not RTFA'ing since 1999
I hate grammar Nazi's.
> Back a few months ago I was developing software [...] I emailed Google about whether or not their AdWords
> could be used in a software environment and they said not at the current moment
That's odd since the Opera browser has Google ads.
... maybe trying to do more is a bad thing. Diversity breeds excellence. To site the rather colorful discussion on yesterdays thread... Women love to shop. Alas, it is true! Wouldn't it be awful is there was only one manufacturer of women's clothing? Talk about cramping our style!
So Google... stick with what you do best and just keep improving it. It's better to do one thing well than to do several things mediocre.
I really think that there is a lot left in webmail besides additional space. I started using a service called Shadango.com 6 months ago and it easily has more features then my old hotmail account. First of all I can check all my pop/imap accounts there from one easy interface. They provide you with a file manager, disposable addresses, and I have like 20MB of space. It's frickin' great. Yes a lot has been done in email, but there are still a lot of avenues that google can explore.
I keep seeing tunnels at the end of all these lights
Brian
there's the timeless classic of when you do a "i'm feeling lucky" of "miserable failure".
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Google does have flaws too! Take a look at the googlewashing of miserable failure it brings up the official biography of George Bush as the first link. More coverage of this issue can be found on Searchenginewatch.com.
"search engine optimization" tactics are reason #1 why it is not game over in the search engine space.
deciding relevance is NP-hard.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I was a alpha tester on Shadango about a year ago actually. When I signed up I used "alphatest" in the promotional code box and I got a free paid account. It might still work, definitely a great service.
Cheers,
Alan Steele
Nice repost of comment #7034877.
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.
i hope they seriously do not entertain thoughts of being a portal. that's what everyone lost out with a few years ago, and things are no different now. let the google labs keep working on specific projects, and offer them as different services, as they do now; instead of becoming a yahoo.
is already in use, albeit in a different form, than a regular email service.
CapeScience built an email interface to the search engine. Send an email, get your Google search results back via email. Lots of places around are calling it GoogleMail
According to the article:
By moving into e-mail -- the Web's most-used program -- Google would open up a huge new market...
Sigh...where to start? How do journalists charged with tech reporting at a major news publication not know the difference between a "program" and an application of a technology, not to mention the difference between the Web and the Internet?
The problem is that in almost any industry that is constantly changing, you have to be ready to make additions, deletions or shifts in business in order to survive. Sometimes staying in one spot can lead to your death (i.e. in the 80/90s it was companies like DEC).
While I do think Google would be wise to improving to what they do best, the truth is that there are other competitors quickly catching up to search. The prudent business move would be to use their leverage in search and branch out (but avoid from spreading themselves too thin).
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
started to roll out a pervasive registration for their various services (Adsense, Adwords)
I should hope they have registration for those two services. For anyone whom doesn't know those are both back-end advertising services offered by google. Adsense is a way to post ads on websites and Adwords is a service to serve up your ads to google's site and Adsense users.
It'd be pretty hard to pay out on the Adsense or charge for the Adwords without registration.. and there's no sense in registering twice if you'd like to use both. I don't see this as being very ominous.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
To me , The fact that google provides an E-mail service isn't a suprise but a natural step of evulotion as a great search engine.
Most search engines such as Lycos , Yahoo and Excite started offering E-mail service when they reached certain size. Actually I think that it was just before thier IPO . So Google actualy walking in the step of its formers.
Their NewsAlert feature allows people to get exactly what they want delivered right to their e-mail.
This opens the door for the dream of big media, a targeted list of people that are actively searching for a specific type of information. To make this even sweeter, they don't even pay for their content.
This will be one of the Top Innovations of 2004.
This is HUGE idea.
I hope that this stops Google's talks with the investment banks. I think going public would be a huge mistake. This comes from personal experience. If they go public, I fear they will become another Micro$oft, forced to chase after ever increasing earnings targets.
That is not a good situation to be in.
Laugh at my ignorance while I learn Rails - a Real ne
Google Search: "monty python" "usage of fuck"
Yes it is a "porny" search term, but the site that has listing 1-300 demonstrates that it is possible (and easy) to really truly spam google.
It looks like some enterprising young porn pusher, has made a page generator. They put very similar pages on a variety of porny domain names then linked them all together. Google sucks it in and slurps it up like you wouldn't believe.
It's all well and good to give 20 MB of space, great service, etc with no ads, but... where does the money come from?
If they're not making any money, they'll either have to change their policies or go down in flames.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Teoma has an algorithm which is not as susceptible to link/link text spam as Google. Its results are used by Ask Jeeves but adulterated with sponsored listings and trusted feed results. AllTheWeb has a big index and a pretty good algorithm, although it's been neglected somewhat by its new owner Yahoo. I'd love to see a serious open-source effort take on Mammon, but the server farms and bandwidth required seem prohibitive.