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Google to Launch Free Mail Service?
prostoalex writes "The New York Times article on Yahoo and Terry Semel's management (soul stealing form required) mentions Google preparing "to offer a free e-mail service, people close to the company said, in a bid for Yahoo's most important source of loyal customers"."
Coming from Google its pretty much a given the tried and tested 'Free Email' sector will see some new and exciting innovations.
However, the KISS method should defintley continue to apply for Google.com - the moment it begins to mimick Yahoo or MSN is the moment it will have lost its edge.
If google starts a mail service, is it really to take on Yahoo? I have a pretty good opinion of Google for most of their decisions and I find it hard to beleive that they would go out and try to attack another company.
Maybe I'm naive, but I beleive if Google has decided to go after new business, it would be because they decided to move into a new market, not because they wanted to act in malace against another company.
I wonder whether Google mail will index my mails. sounds spooky..
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Google was great, but "advertisers" figured out how to game it long ago and I don't think the folks at google are interested in evolving the concept much further. I have serious reservations about MS being able to actually compete with their technology (they can't even figure out what's on their own damn tech support site) but I really wish SOMEONE would do some "duplication and evolution;" maybe THAT would light a fire under some asses at google.
I remember reading about a year ago on one of the google related stories here on slashdot, that the reason google has been very successful is that they've done one thing and done it well, rather than trying to be a portal and integrate everything. Specifically, one poster said that if google ever offered an email service (and implying that that's an unlikely possibility) he'd ditch google for searching and google would soon degenerate into just another website with a Dubious Business Model. Follow up posters agreed with that comment. So, the time has come now. I ask the people who felt that way last year, are you sticking to your decision/analysis? If not, what has changed?
...should be a Google IM based on Jabber! That would rock!
If it can go wrong it wnetscape: Segmentation Fault, Core dumped
I already suggested the benefits for both Google and mozilla.org for Google to replace their IE Toolbar with an official Google branded Firefox. If they don't want to make their mail service freely available through IMAP or POP3 then they could do what Netscape did in NS 7.x and make their mail servers accessible to their own branded mozilla client. Although it would be nice if Google mail would be based on Thunderbird rather than the suite.
Hotmail is available through Outlook Express, so it'd be nice if Google did something similar without the tie in to MS products.
One of Google's mayor strenghts is its simple interface. When compared to other search engines including Yahoo, Google's interface seems very clean and simple, and also the way the whole site is put together. Regular users don't need all the features that Google has to offer, but power users may want to use them, and they can easily find out where they are accessed. For example, Advanced search is on the front page where all can find it; but one must know about other features to use them, and that's not a problem for the users who wants to use these.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
I think that what Yahoo did wrong (boy, I'll bet there are tons of analysts starting sentences the same way) was to try to make a mega-page, to rely on some data that was human-indexed rather than entirely machine-produced, and to fall behind technologically.
Google doesn't do this.
* Google is very spartan. I'm glad to see that all the web designers that thought that fancy web pages are what people want have been shown to be wrong. Excuses like "oh, this is for a 'distinctive feel'" or "we won't look up-to-date without Flash", etc, just don't measure up. Google works well on all browsers, has pages that download quickly, and renders very rapidly. The only large image used is the ever-changing "Google" logo, which gives folks a fair amount of enjoyment (well, *I* get more of a kick out of it than any other single image of that size each day). Their ads are text-based, and there are few links on each page. Their page works well in any browser, including lynx. Spartan is in -- web development has matured, and garish pages with faux metal bits and hard-to-find imagemap-based links are out. Functionality matters.
* All the data that Google presents is produced by a computer, not an array of humans (except for the Directory, which is from dmoz.org, not Google-paid people. They can scale up as far as they want by just increasing their processor power. All their people just figure out how to get the computer to do the right thing. Sure, in the short term that can be a bit less efficient, but it's a big win in the long term.
* Google doesn't fall behind when it comes to technology. Google is rabid about recruiting PhDs working with automated data mining. They are constantly adding neat little features to find, interesting new experimental searches (Google Sets is my favorite), and do an impressive job for a group of people that have hordes of people trying to beat the engine constantly and are avoiding using any human-based indexing.
May we never see th
Let's look at the facts:
First, there was Google. Beautiful searching. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google cache. Beautiful, wonderful idea. Love it dearly.
Then, there was Google image searches, and News, and it was all still good.
But adding free mail to it? I'm starting to worry that our at-one-time all-simple, all-powerful, all-effective search engine is becoming (possibly?) another Yahoo? They're already the most widely-used search engine (by far!), but why offer free mail? Leave that to the low-life such as Microsoft and Yahoo.
Don't get me wrong, Google's seemed to manage everything quite smoothly thus far, and is still a wonderful site to use for everything they've made (besides searching, I use image search and the news listings & searches quite often). But free mail is quite a big undertaking...will they be able to manage it and still stay as good as they are?
The point is, they have to be original if they want someone new to notice them, and webmail sure ain't original.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
I know i know, yahoo's front page is clutting as hell, links upon links.
but have you taken a look at the actual search page, it actually looks damn clean.
I like it better than google's interface IMO.
kawai
I've used Google since Infoseek ceased to be the best, and like everyone else, I've noticed the gradual reduction of relevancy as people figure out how to scam Google for higher placement. Reading about this, I had an idea that is probably not original: Could a search engine be set with Slash-style moderation code, so irrelevant results could be modded down by annoyed users? Is there an engine that does this already?
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
I love all the web. My top three search engines are AlltheWeb, Google, and Kartoo. Google gets the majority of my searches, just because it's built into Safari. But if I'm going in, fknowing that I'm looking for specific results, then I always start with AlltheWeb. I use Kartoo when I want to break results out quickly and visually--come up with more defined search terms, etc.
I suppose it is folly to make a serious reponse to a post modded "funny", but I should point out that the OS that Google uses to run their servers (a *highly* modified GNU/Linux variant) is usually reffered to as the Google OS since it was designed by them specifically for their server farms (I think anyway). Also, I believe there is a GFS (Google File System, or Gordon Food Services - an entirely unrelated business) which is the distributed file system run at - of course - their server farms.
Not duplication, revolution is the notion you want: Google was successful because its founders believed in a completely new paradigm, that graph-based methods (PageRank, HITS) could outperform dusty (but effective) vector-space retrieval.
Many people have a shady intuition of what information retrieval really is ("Um.. yeah, you look the pages up in which the keywords occur"), trivializing the area. Go to any top-500 company and try their site search if you want to have a good laugh.
What we need is once more something completely different. It still holds that there is more than one way to do it!
One way is to go ahead and build a distributed indexing scheme (see my earlier posting on this theme), borrowing conepts from SETI@home or Freenet, because an index that cannot be located anywhere cannot be controlled. It might also be a better test-bed for large-scale experiments, but where only few developers want to try out new algorithms ("at home"), using the distributed indices built on distributed, donated diskspace around the world.
If they'll provide POP or IMAP access without having to pay for it like Yahoo!, I'm sure it will be quite succesfull.
That's not a good idea from the business point of view. If people are popping their mail, they're not seeing text adds. What's the point?
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
I've often wondered if Google would do well as taking the clicking of the "Next" link as an implicit lack of confidence in the current pages search and having an abandoned search be an implicit vote of confidence. After all, if you have stopped searching, the current page of search results likely contains a good answer. If you click next, then the current page is likely not to have one.