Gmail and the clash of the titans

"You're one of the very first people to use Gmail. Your input will help determine how it evolves, so we encourage you to send your feedback, suggestions and questions to us. But mostly, we hope you'll enjoy experimenting with Google's approach to email," Google tells me in a mail i received after I signed up to the Gmail.

I am excited to be one of the first people to use it.

Is it a new wild wild west, an unknown frontier of the Internet that will bring more possibilities? Ever since Google announced Gmail in March 2004 and introduced it on 1 April , the excitement has increased.

Google first invited about 1,000 employees, friends and family members for the testing of Gmail. Some bloggers got the invitation soon (Google owns blogger.com) and Gmail has been the one of the hot topics among bloggers.

Gmail offers very good features. It provides 1 GB of storage (1000 MB) which is a lot compared to other web-based feee emails. When Gmail was introduced Yahoo was offering 4 MB and Hotmail provides 2 MB.

Recently when I went to the Yahoo Mail page after a long break, I was surprised to see that they had changed their interface. With a new look and design, Yahoo is offering 100 MB of storage now. This change, which was brought in early June, also included the offer of 2 GB of storage for paid users of Yahoo.

Indeed, Gmail is only part of the competition between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Google is now going into new areas dominated by portals compared to its previous status as a search engine. Email is an important part of the big portals and what Google is offering as Gmail is an attempt to drive more consumers to what Google will offer.

Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, told Wired in March that 1 GB is offered because that is the estaimated amount of storage that an average user will need to store one decade's email.

I have mail dating back to a few years stored in my Hotmail inbox. Sometimes I had exceeded my storage limit, mainly due to friends sending large attachments, and the Hotmail janitor cleaned some of mails. Otherwise I would have had mail dating back to 1997 when I opened my Hotmail account.

Storage is definitely an attraction in Gmail but what I like more is the search capabilities. Now I am able to maintain the storage in Hotmail but I forward important mails to a POP account of mine. What is more difficult in web-based mails is going through all mails one by one. Through Gmail's huge storage and search capabilities, one could store mails for years and search for the mail that is needed.

Meanwhile, Gmail is facing criticism for serving ads, customised to the content of incoming emails. Even though the mails will be scanned by computers, many people believe this is an invasion to privacy.

As Google is entering the traditional domain of Microsoft and Yahoo, the two email and portal giants are also entering new ground in search engine business. This may be excatly what sparked the fierce competition. Yahoo, which had used Google search previously in its search area, abandoned Google recently.

Microsoft is responding to Gmail. It has announced that it will increase Hotmail's free email storage from 2 MB to 250 MB and paid email service (costing US$19.95 a year) to 2 GB. The change will start in early July.

"With these new offers, storage will not be an issue for MSN Hotmail customers," Silicon.com quotes Blake Irving, corporate vice president of communication services for MSN, saying in a statement.

AskJeeves is also planning to offer 125 MB of free email storage to email subscribers.

Microsoft will unveil new improvements to its search capabilities in July. In Silicon.com Iain Ferguson quotes Bill Gates having said in a media briefing in Sydney that Microsoft had "several milestones with its search site" on the way.

The IT giant will roll out the most powerful features later this year. Gates described the way searches are currently done as "very low tech." He has a vision of a search that will include personalisation, understanding local information, being able to parse in to the semantics of a document, being able to browse databases and being able to attach domain knowledge.

Microsoft will use its experience in linguistic research to parse documents so that a person looking for computer chips will not get potato chips in search results, according to Gates.

What Microsoft is looking for is a system that will allow users to search for files in the computer, emails and websites. The system will be integrated with the next version of the operating system Microsoft is expected to release in 2006. The integration with the OS is likely to spark new debates about Microsoft having an unfair advantage in the search business.

As both Microsoft and Yahoo bring improvements to their search to get a share of the US$105.6 million Google generated as profits in 2003, we the consumers will no doubt benefit.