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Google to Launch Free Mail Service?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Feb 22, 2004 09:00 AM
from the hit-them-where-it-hurts dept.
from the hit-them-where-it-hurts dept.
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"."
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Google Portal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish someone would... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Informative)
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Try alltheweb.com (Score:5, Informative)
Alltheweb is a bit more international than google (I believe its hosted in Europe somewhere) and is owned by Overture who sells google lots of search info.
About us page here. [alltheweb.com]
They also seem to have a knack for lowering the importance of weblogs, which seems to be a big issue with some people nowadays.
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Re:Try alltheweb.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you don't want blogs in your results; HOW TO (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a simple way to get most blogs out of your results in google or any other search engine (personally I use Gigablast [gigablast.com] as my primary):
Type search query plus "-blog"
Et voila!
Of course it can't help it if some pages are ranked high because they are linked from blogs, but I don't think that anything from the user-side can change that.
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Advertisers figuring out Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Advertisers figuring out Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderation is a way to enforce groupthink, not to encourage what is best.
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Re:Advertisers figuring out Google (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, can you tell me what an *incorrect opinion* is?
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Re:The trouble with moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Internal link/redirect (Score:5, Informative)
That is how Yahoo! seems to work, but not Google. For example, if I search for "Slashdot" on Google, I get this as the first link (right-click, copy link location):
"http://slashdot.org/"
in Yahoo!, I get:
"http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=slashdot/
When Yahoo! started doing that is when I stopped using Yahoo.
From looking at these results, I don't think Google really has any idea what links I selected.
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Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the sort of "problem" with only one solution: the user needs to narrow down the search himself. Continuing the mobo example, by supplying more... like processor architecture, manufacturer, and so on. To expect google to automagically do this FOR you is to defeat the purpose of a useful search engine - you're asking them to make all the choices for you. That's bound to make the wrong choices. Frequently. And it opens up a new way for shadier search engines to take money in exchange for adding bias into their results, or for random scammish web page designers to try to game the system.
The solution is basically what google already does: there's a "search within these results" box you can use to narrow down your search if you got a big pile of uselessly generic results. I suggest you use that.
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Paradigm shift, not duplication needed [Re:I wish] (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [cornell.edu]) 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.
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Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Google Portal? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of Google's mayor strenghts is its simple interface. When compared to other search engines including Yahoo, Google's interface [google.com] 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 [google.com] is on the front page where all can find it; but one must know about other features [google.com] to use them, and that's not a problem for the users who wants to use these.
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Re:Google Portal? (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo's search page [yahoo.com] is also pretty simple, but probably not what people generally think of using when searching with Yahoo.
Maybe that's just a question of priorities - which set of features gets on the 'front' page. So long as Google keeps its front page the simple one, that probably won't be an issue.
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Re:Google Portal? (Score:5, Interesting)
but have you taken a look at the actual search page [yahoo.com], it actually looks damn clean.
I like it better than google's interface IMO.
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Client (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Client (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Excellent Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they will need to invest a lot of effort into spam filtering for the service to be of any value.
cant resist it (Score:5, Funny)
Positive progress (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
True, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:True, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Positive progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Their designers/programmers, happily possess a full set of clues. They understand that the Web is not TV, and that HTML is a carrier for contents, not eye candy.
If they can do this right with free webmail too, they win even more brownie points!
Don't get me started about sites that give you error messages (or worse yet, fail dismally without explanation) simply because you don't have *script or foo-browser-extension from M$.
Or, the even more annoying ones that complain and refuse to let you in when they think you aren't using MSIE but in fact work perfectly if you instruct your browser to lie about what it is.
K*I*S*S!
-- MG
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Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, if someone is emailing you about overcoming the Great Satan, perhaps some of the ads will be for flight schools in your area. It's just helpful search routines with no privacy issues at all. Nothing to worry about citizen, the computer is your friend.
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Uh-oh (Score:5, Funny)
Step 1: Google takes over search engines
Step 2: Google takes over webmail services
Step 3: Tomorrow - the world!
What next? The Google OS?
Actually, there already is a Google OS (Score:5, Interesting)
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Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be just great. Then we could not only get tons of Viagra and penis enlargement emails, we could also tons of Viagra and penis enlargement targeted text ads. Maybe even all in the same email. Can't wait.
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The next step.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't believe Yahoo on this one (Score:5, Insightful)
The main thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
I already suggested [slashdot.org] the benefits for both Google and mozilla.org for Google to replace their IE Toolbar with an official Google branded Firefox [mozilla.org]. 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 [mozilla.org] 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.
Re:The main thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
More people would use Mozilla products if they were aware of them and Google has the name to push them. Continuing to depend on IE for their toolbar product sounds like a bad idea when they've got the opportunity to entice people over to a browser that's not written by a company that's currently hostile towards Google.
Of course, Google would still work in IE, just like it does now (unlikely MS would do anything that bad to stop people visiting google.com), so IE users can still happily use Google.
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The irony... (Score:5, Informative)
Here ya go. [nytimes.com] (The same article is also available in The Ledger [theledger.com])
Um, wait a second here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Google MusicSearch? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is, they have to be original if they want someone new to notice them, and webmail sure ain't original.
Google + Hushmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you imagine a world in which you can say to someone: "what you mean you don't encrypt your emails?" Please make it so google!
Re:Usability (Score:5, Insightful)
It's that mindset that keeps encrypted email from becoming a standard, and there is a major flaw in it. The real reason for encrypting everything is not so much to protect your photo collection or personal emails, but to completely cripple anyone (NSA, perhaps?) who would want to intercept everyone's email.
Currently, there are very few people using encryption for email, so if the NSA notices that Joe Geek is, they might suspect that he has something to hide and start throwing massive computing resources at cracking his private key. However, if absolutely everyone was encrypting their email, no privacy-invading government org would know whose email to even begin decrypting. Thus, we'd all be safe.
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Why it's creepy (Score:5, Insightful)
Extrapolate this to any words that somebody would be willing to pay to watch, regarding politics, religion, cults, music, or whatever other creepy corners your paranoia guides you to.
The important difference between targetting ads to web pages vs email is that web pages are designed for wide publication. The contents of email is usually meant to be private.
What about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Informative)
If someone took googlemail.com and used it, they could lose their trade mark and cause confusion, with or without knowing it. Paying $200 for 5 or so years for a trademark'd domain is sure cheaper than keeping a lawyer in court.
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Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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that's what the free market is about (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how every company and every business works in this country. It is for that very reason - direct competition - that we have so many awesome, cool products and services. At the end of the day, consumers want the best value for their dollar, the most choices, the most convenience. It's what a free market is all about.
So consider this, if Google creates an email service, and Yahoo starts to see some of its customers switch to Google, then Yahoo will be in a position to either a) do nothing, or b) offer something new to make Yahoo an even better service than it was before.
At the end of the day, if both services are doing a really good job, then they'll split the user base. But if one is really doing a better job than the other, that one will "win" the majority (usually). End-users will have more choices for web-based email, and we'll possibly see other services created to entice us to switch services.
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Re:The question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not in business to make you guys feel good about them. They are in business to make money.
Yeah, and the two are, like, totally mutually exclusive, right? Believe it or not, but word-of-mouth is still the most effective form of advertising ever, and the best way to get that is to keep customers happy. In this case, google relies a lot on people telling each other just how cool this search engine is, and how quickly it loads, and how you're not spammed to death with advertisements, and guess what, it bloody works! Every person in my social circle who owns a computer knows google, and that includes some seriously digitally handicapped individuals....hi mom!
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Re:Office XP flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Webmail services are not meant to be checked with a mail reader - but with a browswer. MS has hacked something together to make Outlook work w. Hotmail, but that's an exception. Outlook won't be able to check Yahoo mail or your ISP's webmail (though your ISP probably offers POP, which Outlook will gladly check) except through some 3rd party webmail-to-pop utilities.
If Google wants people to use any reader of their choosing to check their e-mail, they will open POP accounts which no "bug" in XP will keep from being accessible.
If Google follows the pattern that Yahoo has - ie, you only get POP when you pay the subscription fee, otherwise use the webmail interface - then it won't work w. Outlook (or Thunderbird or any of them).
Hope this clarifies the magic of e-mail a bit.
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