Google strikes with ‘G-mail’

Lisa Baertlein

CALIFORNIA: Google Inc., the world's No. 1 Internet search provider, said it will begin testing a free search-based e-mail product called Gmail, as it continues striking back at rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.

The new service, which goes live Thursday at www.gmail.com, will automatically organize e-mail according to topic and allow users to search their e-mail -- including sender, text and subject lines -- in the same way they search the Web, Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, said.

Mountain View, California-based Google also will provide one gigabyte of storage to free account holders, far more than that offered by rivals Yahoo and Microsoft's Internet unit, MSN, which each built strong user bases around free e-mail services and have been attacking Google's prominence as a Web search provider.

Google is widely expected to sell shares in an initial public offering later this year, and some in Silicon Valley had predicted the company would roll out an e-mail service to match offerings from Yahoo and MSN.

"E-mail is the killer (application) for getting people to share information," said Gary Stein, senior analyst at Jupiter Research. Such information is seen by search providers as key to delivering more personalized results.

"It's the march of Google toward being a destination," Stein said, echoing a widely held view that the company is moving closer to being an Internet portal like Yahoo and MSN, with a full range of products and services from e-mail to online shopping.

"We want to organize and present all the world's information," Rosing said, who added that the service will be formally launched in "weeks to months."

Rosing said the company has no active plans to add Gmail to the main Google.com page, as it has done with previous test programs like News and Froogle, its price-comparison shopping tool.

(Additional reporting by Jim Christie and Duncan Martell)

© Reuters