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Follow UsEric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo Inc. said it has improved the way people can search text, photos and documents inside e-mail.
Advances in the way people search e-mail reflect the transformation of the popular text communications medium into a means of sharing photos and other documents, turning e-mail increasingly into an individual's personal history archive.
"It's definitely more than what e-mail of yesteryear was," Sabrina Ellis, Yahoo Mail's director of product management, said in a phone interview on Monday ahead of the announcement.
The need to search e-mails is an outgrowth of the expanding capacity of e-mail systems. Spurred by Google's Gmail service, Yahoo offers 1 gigabyte of e-mail storage free, or 2 gigabytes for a small annual fee.
"As soon as you have more to store, you need more ways to search," JupiterResearch analyst Eric Peterson said. "A battle is shaping up between Yahoo and Google over who can best organize people's information."
Last week, Google Inc. upgraded its Google Desktop search system to index a user's Gmail or Microsoft Outlook e-mail accounts while also searching the hard drive and Web search history.
Searches for photos, ignores misspellings
Yahoo users can trawl through e-mail files in far greater detail. Searches can focus on subject lines, the body of text and even attached documents, without first having to open the e-mail. Searching for photos by name returns a slideshow of thumbnail versions of the pictures
Users can search for prefixes, or just the first few letters of a word, in recognition of the sloppy or casual spelling of many e-mail writers, Ellis said.
Yahoo plans to offer the new service to a small group in US initially and then introduce it around the globe over the next several months.
With an estimated 219 million e-mail accounts in July, Yahoo held 35.1 percent of the world market, just behind Hotmail's 221 million users, or 35.5 percent.
Google counts an unspecified number of "millions" of users for its more recently introduced Gmail.