The web鈥檚 most popular search engine Google has revealed plans to provide a free online email service featuring huge storage capacity, complex searching and sorting capabilities and smart adverts.
Google鈥檚 new service, Gmail, will permit users to store up to a gigabyte of data for free, enough to keep hundreds of thousands of old messages. The most popular free email services currently offer far less storage space.
Yahoo, which leads the free online email market with over 52 million users, provides four megabytes of storage space per account. And Microsoft gives each of the 45 million people who use Hotmail just two megabytes of free space. Users can pay to receive more storage.
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If Gmail proves popular, and there are many reasons to suppose it will, it will require an enormous amount of storage space. For every million users Google attracts, it will have to provide 1000 terabytes of storage, although not everyone will use the maximum capacity of their account.
Few dollars
However, some estimates suggest it will cost Google only a few dollars per gigabyte and Danny Sullivan, editor of the search industry news site SearchEngineWatch.com, believes this is a price Google can well afford. 鈥淚t鈥檚 probably something they could absorb pretty easily through advertising,鈥� Sullivan told 快猫短视频.
The search company apparently intends to make money from Gmail by displaying text advertisements next to email messages, selected to reflect the content of those messages. Similar ads already appear next to Google search results.
The advantage of such an approach is that adverts can be tailored to a particular user鈥檚 interest. For example, if a user receives an email about baseball, the accompanying text ads can promote baseball merchandise.
A possible downside is that users must be willing to have their email routinely searched by Google, even though the company has promised that this will be a 鈥渃ompletely automated鈥� process.
鈥淎 human isn鈥檛 going to read the mail and, so far, they don鈥檛 seem to be planning to keep a record [of searches],鈥� says Sullivan. 鈥淏ut they鈥檙e still reading them.鈥�
No filing
The ability to search through messages quickly and effectively could also set Gmail apart other free email services. And many prospective users will already be familiar with the Google鈥檚 ability to perform searches of the web effectively.
鈥淵our mail comes in. You don鈥檛 have to file it. You can just do a query based on what you remember about it,鈥� says Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google.
鈥淚 love the idea that you could find something in your email as easily as you can on Google,鈥� says Sullivan. 鈥淭his is something we all struggle with.鈥�
Machine learning
One key test for Gmail will be its ability to tackle spam, the unwanted email advertisements that clog many users鈥� inboxes. The 鈥渇requently asked questions鈥� posted on the Gmail website suggest that this will depend to some extent on users reporting what messages are spam.
This could enable some sort of machine learning algorithm to predict which future messages are spam and which are legitimate messages. Some desktop email applications can already be trained in this way to recognise spam. Some even report back to a central server to help other users filter their email.
But Sullivan notes: 鈥淚f a lot of people use Gmail then Google might have the jump on other people at doing this.鈥�
Gmail is currently being tested by a relatively small number of users. The service will be launched fully once Google is confident it can support millions of users.