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."

Moooogle

Just think when you get all your usual spam, it will be annotaed by keyword to other sites that sell similar crap

Google does it again...

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

Prepare to be underhwelmed

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.

Re:Well Actually

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:Prepare to be underhwelmed

What is left in webmail?

What was left in search before Google started adding features? Until Google took over the market, people thought that search engines were just about finding relevent stuff and seeing a page full of adverts. Google proved that they could build a less advert-laden page, add features such as caching with keyword highlighting, translation, word/pdf conversion, etc, whilst still remaining lucrative.

They've revolutionised news aggregation with their automatic classification and sorting. They are the definitive Usenet archive (mostly thanks to their Deja Vu buyout, but still). They have bought out Blogger and will almost certainly move things forward in that respect.

The question isn't "what can they possibly offer?". The question is "why wouldn't you expect them to excel at this?".

Froogle

I don't know about any of you, but "Froogle" hasn't impressed me yet. I am a frequent user of pricewatch [pricewatch.com] and techbargains [techbargains.com], 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.

Re:Froogle

why don't you try buying something other than computer hardware or software? Froogle has much more than computer stuff.

Because it still sucks!

froogle is generations behind Yahoo! Shopping, pricewatch, shopper.com etc.'s ability to distinguish actual items for sale from reviews, previews, and other non-merchandising content.

Yet froogle insists on attaching a price to every result returned on a search, often an incorrect one.

Often times a froogle search will turn up pages of "results," but when you go to sort by price, all of the sudden you wind up with only a handful of listings. In effect their software is saying, "well, I wasn't too sure about some of these."

Re:Froogle

They seem to do a good job with non-computer bits. Look for a set of 6L6 or EL84 tubes, or a Traxxas Nitro Rustler, or an inflatable christmas tree on Techbargains or Pricewatch and you're very likely to be disappointed.

Re:Froogle

Google was in beta for a really fucking long time. Look at Debian. It's damn stable (not counting the major breach, as that affected ALL distros) because it's been worked on for a VERY long time to move through unstable, then testing, then stable. Not a Debian zealot (god, a Debian workstation seems impossible to get working), but just saying that sometimes stuff turns out better when it ages. Also, Froogle is searching every site with a $ sign. PriceWatch, DealTime, etc., they're just getting price lists from their partners, ready to feed into the engines.

Re:Froogle

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.

That's not what Froogle is for. When you know exactly what you want, and want the best possible price, sites like pricewatch, techbargains, mysimon, epinions, etc. are great for this. When you don't know exactly what you want, or don't know what it's called, or don't know what category it would be in, Froogle is excellent.

The near future.......?

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...

Re:The near future.......?

The idea of an agent that crawls the net searching for stuff for you is kinda dumb. Google has already done the crawling, and can serve you the results instantly, whenever you want. The biggest problem is *expressing what you're searching for* in terms that a computer can understand. Without a solution to that problem, an intelligent agent can't be any better than a Google search. If that problem is solved, then Google can still serve you results instantly, without any "intelligent agent" crawling the web specifically for you. The intelligence is all in Google's algorithms, and there's no need for any agents.

To me, the whole idea of intelligent agents sounds too much like Clippy. I don't want software giving me suggestions and telling me what I would like. OTOH, software presenting a list of information that might be useful is OK. It's kind of a psychological thing. Amazon.com doesn't have an "intelligent agent" that tells you what products you would like; instead it has a page with a list of things that are similar or related to products you've shopped for. The end result is the same, and the difference is subtle, but I think it's an important psychological one. The computer shouldn't display intelligence and boss you around; instead it should act like a mechanical device that simply responds to input that you give it. Intelligent agents don't allow you to actually do anything you can't do with passive, subservient software. They're just more obnoxious and annoying.

Portals

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? :)

Re:Portals

My answer to this is

(1) I don't want a portal.
(2) Historically, when search services become portals, their search services suffer as a result, or else try to force you to jump over all their portal "features" to use the search features you came to use.
(3) I have multiple times in the past found myself having to stop using a search engine (for example, altavista) because they just couldn't keep their frigging portal-ness out of my face.

If google added portal features, I'd be OK with that as long as I could just keep using the search and not have to think about their portal. However I just have trouble trust that anyone, even google, could start "being a portal" and yet not have their core service lose focus or otherwise suffer as a result.

Oy.

Dear Google,

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.fr 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.

Please remedy this before trying to do other things.

Thank you.

Re:Oy.

Remember when yahoo! had a useful catalog of sites? Remember when their search/catalog started sucking? remember when they added featres like email, new, stock quotes, chat, etc?

Remember when google had a useful search engine....

Re:Oy.

the only instant messaging applications with video and voice (for calling Grandma in England or getting a little naughty).

Oh god, I misread that "or" as an "and".

Real world example of Google suckage

I did this search about a month ago, reported the results to Google and it still sucks donkey balls:

Google Search: "monty python" "usage of fuck" [google.com]

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.

Re:Oy.

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.

Keep the Look

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.

Google AdSense and e-mail

Google's AdSense [google.com] program, which allows you to get paid for ads on your website, explicitly prohibits [google.com] 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.

Google continues to expand their services but...

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?

Thus it begins

1) Web-based company? Check.
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.

Re:Thus it begins

Exactly my fear.

Google has done it's one thing so well, they should just be happy with it.

If they feel the need to go portal ( and let me just say "#1 fucking retarded idea of the year...but whatever" ), they should launch an entirely different site ( and company, preferrably ).

If they feel the need to do so, add shit like "From the makers of Google!"

Wild Speculation

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!

Then again...

...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

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

Google-powered spam filtering?

The guys are at Google are so innovative [google.com], I'm sure they could come up with some spam filtering technology. They could leverage info from their USENET archive [google.com] or the web.

Lock

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? [colingregorypalmer.net]

American Weblog in London [colingregorypalmer.net]

Two Words....

Embrace and extend.

less on the actual web serving?

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...

Anyone else having trouble with google?

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.

I would like a Journal tab in Google.

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.

This is no surprise

According to the law of software envelopment [jwz.org]:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Email was inevitable for Google

Ultimately this is the only long-term sticky application on the web. This is true for Microsoft and Yahoo, who leverage entire networks of services based on the id people initially used to get their email.

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.

Bad move

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.

Pipe dream "what if":

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 "[e-mail]".

This Does Not Mean Google Is Becoming A Portal

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.

End of Google?

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?

free million dollar idea for google...

offer porn. you could call it 'ogle'

Re:free million dollar idea for google...

When they launched their Image service I suggested they call it Go Ogle.

Nothing ever came of it. sigh.

Even better...

... they also registered the following domain names:
googleporn.com [whois.org]
googlesucks.com [whois.org]

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 [whois.org] containing the google keyword.

[e-mail]

I found a cool List of Google Features [freepint.com] 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!

Googlemail.com

http://www.arb-forum.com/domains/decisions/114712. htm Possibly the REAL reason they registered it... --Proudly not RTFA'ing since 1999

On second thought...

... 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.

GoogleMail

is already in use, albeit in a different form, than a regular email service.

CapeScience [capeclear.com] built an email interface to the search engine. Send an email, get your Google search results back via email. Lots of places [google.com] around are calling it GoogleMail

Google's offer is no suprise

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.

Re:Too Good To Be True

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.

Re:Interesting things at google.

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

Re:Interesting things at google.

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.

Nothing here

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.

Re:Interesting things at google.

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?

Re:Interesting things at google.

Nice repost of comment #7034877 [slashdot.org].

WARNING: post is plagiarized

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

Re:Interesting things at google.

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.