Google to Launch Free Mail Service? 329
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"."
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.
Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Try alltheweb.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Advertisers figuring out Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Advertisers figuring out Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderation is a way to enforce groupthink, not to encourage what is best.
The trouble with moderation (Score:3, Insightful)
Just a thought. I'm mostly wondering whether it's been done already.
Re:The trouble with moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Advertisers figuring out Google (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, can you tell me what an *incorrect opinion* is?
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.
Re:Internal link/redirect (Score:4, Informative)
Taken from a search for Slashdot:
<a href=/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://slashdot.org/&e=7
Re:I wish someone would... (Score:4, Informative)
Instead of typing:
K8NNXP motherboard reviews
(for example)
type:
"motherboard" +K8NNXP +review
You will be sure to get a result from that
Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wish someone would... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess Google is a victim of its own success.
Re:Google Portal? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
Yahoo tracks your clicks (Score:4, Interesting)
And I'm pretty sure Yahoo is using Google engine again (I get the same results).
Re:Google Portal? (Score:4, Informative)
Client (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Client (Score:2, Funny)
I hope they won't offer a service to search content trough private e-mails.
--END OF JOKE--
YahooPOPs! -- I'm LOVIN' it !!! (Score:4, Informative)
What is it? Well, YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! E-mail accounts. It works in both Windoze and Unix.
What it does is emulate a POP3/SMTP server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, IncrediMail, Calypso, etc., to DOWNLOAD AND SEND emails from Yahoo! accounts.
It's amazing, bro. I had NO idea it'd even work. I had to download it to believe it. There are also other similar programs out there for MSN, Lycos, etc.
No self-respecting webmail user should be WITHOUT it.
Re:YahooPOPs! -- I'm LOVIN' it !!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like hotwayd [sourceforge.net] which does much the same thing for Hotmail. I think hotwayd also works for Lycos and a few other webmail providers.
I've got it set up and it works fine, though it only picks up mail from your inbox, not your junk mail or anything. If you want it picking up from multiple folders you just have to set up multiple copies of the daemon to look in each folder.
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?
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.
Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:4, Informative)
[snip]
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-302458)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
CA
94043 US
Domain Name: googlemail.com
Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com
Administrative Contact:
DNS Admin
(NIC-1467103)
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94043 US
dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
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Google Inc.
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View
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94043 US
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Created on..............: 2001-Jul-18.
Expires on..............: 2005-Jul-18.
Record last updated on..: 2003-Dec-30 15:39:37.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.32.10
NS2.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.34.10
NS3.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.36.10
NS4.GOOGLE.COM 216.239.38.10
Alldomains.com - The Leader in Corporate Domain Management
$
Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:2, Insightful)
If Google were to link to Google Mail, the link would appear somewhere else on the page.
Re:Certainly seems like they're planning for it... (Score:5, Insightful)
cant resist it (Score:5, Funny)
Google's current own pr0n search engine (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:True, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Yahoo's manual effort has been dead for some time (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't be so naive though to think Google is a room of computers. When people write in to complain about kiddie porn, removal requests, etc, this must be handled by a person, just like at any search site.
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
The question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to spoil it for a lot of you people, but Google is no longer run by the engineers. They have a CEO. They also have a bunch of backers who want to get paid a lot of money when this company goes public. They are not in business to make you guys feel good about them. They are in business to make money.
Re:The question is... (Score:3, Informative)
That's totally false. The CEO you mention is Eric Schmidt, who has a PhD in computer science and is the author of Lex [google.com], the automatic scanner generator. The founders still hold controlling interest in the stock. Google is the most engineering-driven company you're likely to come across.
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!
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.
Re:The question is... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think a lot of people will jump over.
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.
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?
You forgot #4 (Score:2, Funny)
Actually, there already is a Google OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually, there already is a Google OS (Score:3, Informative)
Still, it would be pretty neat to see Google OS if you ask me.
Sad to say (Score:4, Funny)
I know it is now almost a mantra set in stone that "Google is dying". Unfortunately, the abuse of that fact by trolls has obscured the truth, that truth being that Google really is dying.
My main reason for moving away from Google to MSN Search has been twofold. First, to avoid the constant IPO uncertainties. And secondly, to investigate more promising and viable entries in the search engine sweepstakes. Google is no longer a legitimate player, I'm sorry to say.
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.
Privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally I don't want Google reading/analysing my e-mail. Even if is just some algorithm.
Re:Privacy (Score:2)
Why not? Ashamed of what the computer software will think. With every email system, the administrators could easilly be able to read your emails without you even knowing. Having an algorithm analyise the text is hardly an invasion of privacy.
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost all email clients and servers analyse your mail these days. That's how the spam filters work.
Re:Makes sense (Score:3, Informative)
The next step.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The next step.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd really like to see this, because the Jabber world really needs it. If we can't convince any of the existing major IM players to adopt Jabber, then we need a new company to enter the ring. But is Google large enough to take them on?
What if I... (Score:2)
I don't believe Yahoo on this one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't believe Yahoo on this one (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're on static IP it's even more trivial... you don't even need the time.
Sweet... (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost a dupe (Score:4, Informative)
Google Eyes New Email Service, Expansion [slashdot.org] on Monday January 19, @04:02PM
Posted by simoniker [mailto] on Monday January 19, @04:02PM
from the ultimate-internet-moogles dept.
GillBates0 writes "According to a CNN/Reuters story, Google is developing a service to attach its lucrative keyword-based advertising to email [cnn.com]: ''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 [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 [google.com]."
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:3, Insightful)
Re:The main thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm looking forward to the smartupdate feature in Firefox and hopefully there'll be enough people to test it to death when it arrives in 0.9 so that we can get a really solid 1.0
Here's what I think the apps need to be succ
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.
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?
Why does mail have to be complicated? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I hope that they will allow free POP access. That's what got me to open my Geocities mail account, which later turned into Yahoo. Then they made it a pay service and I stopped using it.
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.
Re:Google MusicSearch? (Score:3, Informative)
You mean like... (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean like when they decided to go for the ancient idea of "internet searches"? Altavista, Yahoo etc. weren't exactly whimps when Google came along. I'm not quite sure how Google wants to do better on this one though, free email is pretty much the same boilerplate thing everywhere.
Kjella
doing things well (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether or not the NYT article is correct or not doesn't really matter. The plain fact is that Google faces increases competition, and they need to offer more services to maintain their position as number 1. A Google email service is A) cool B) useful for people. As posters before has said, it would probably come quite feature laden, and thus be popular.
oooh now I can finally get (Score:4, Funny)
On a serious note: google is very tight lipped about what services they will be launching (until after they launch/beta) so not sure how credible these rumblings are...
E.
This gives me hope... (Score:2)
...with that kind of name recognition, and google's technical ability and design sense, I might finally be able to persuade my family not to use hotmail.
(sigh)
google spam filters? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are still some things they have not done that they could.
If google does what it is famous for...being innovative and simple..with spam filtering I will drop yahoo email like Dr. Atkins dropping a hot potato.
Steve
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!
Usability (Score:4, Informative)
By "easy" I mean that I should literally have to do nothing to use it. If I have to create a keypair it should be when I sign up, and I shouldn't have to ever need to think about it again. I should have a "send encrypted" button beside the "send" button or a preference. I shouldn't have to get my friends to mail me their public keys, the service/client should obtain them automatically somehow. Essentially I shouldn't have to do a single thing more difficult than today's webmail services.
I really don't have anything top secret enough to say to my friends that I would find value in encrypted mail. The huge inconvenience that is the current state of encrypted mail just isn't worth it to me... and it definitely won't be to my mum, or non-tech friends.
However, if someone can do encrypted mail without any added inconveniences, I will be the first to sign up.
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.
Re:Usability (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh I agree with you 100%. But neither I nor 99% of other users out there are part of the tinfoil hat crowd - the so-called benefit to civilisation that would be provided by encrypting all my mail just isn't worth the inconvenience to 99% of people.
And while I have a strong interest in cryptography from a mathematical and theoretical point of view, I also have a personal belief in openness and a dislike of secrecy. Like most people I k
Re:Usability (Score:3, Interesting)
Without Numbers (Score:3, Funny)
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
I know what my email address will be (Score:3, Funny)
You can go ahead and try to send email there now, but I haven't quite got it activated yet. Soon though, soon.
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.
Blogger perhaps.... (Score:3, Interesting)
it makes sense that they would want to draw more users to their blogger service and provide more web-services through that brand (and in turn sell more ads).
I personally cannot see them bloating up google.com, but you never know.
What about... (Score:5, Funny)
Google as Coca- Cola (Score:3, Interesting)
The reasons Google could/should launch an email service is the brand that they have created. As all the posts here corroborate, the Google as a brand is respected both in the tech community as well as the main stream, which is one of the reasons it is so successful. So even if it launches a free email service, its own branding power, regardless of features will draw many users there.
Now if Google reigns in its business and marketing departments to keep the mail free of extraneous features and ad-attacks err. advertising, it will be more successful than Yahoo! and/or Hotmail purely by that feature alone. However if it becomes another advertising saturated free email service it will just be another player in the market not a dominant one.
The reason that Yahoo! and MSN have turned into bloated portals is the same reason that Google is drawn create other services (froogle, images, ect.) to keep users in and use the power of their brands to hold users within their marketing umbrella. It's only too easy to add links and 'portal' type features to any popular web page for commercial reasons, which is the trap that Google must not fall into.
How Google's email will work (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How Google's email will work (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, it's possible that Google will give up to 1GB per user = 1TB per 1000 users = 1PetaByte per million of user, but it does seem VERY unlikely.
Not that I wouldn't like seeing that if you are right.
remember that DEJA had free-email ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yahoo Misses the Point (Score:3, Interesting)