Search player Google is getting into the e-mail game

The company is testing Gmail, a free, ad-supported Web-based e-mail service that leverages the company's dominance in search. The move pits Google even more strongly against Yahoo! and Microsoft, both of which offer extremely popular free e-mail services. It also more firmly establishes Google as a portal, rather than simply a search destination. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company says a "handful" of users are currently testing the Webmail service, built on the idea that e-mail should be easy to search and store. Gmail organizes messages by "conversations" that show messages in the context of the replies sent in response to them, the company said. Google is also boasting about the spam-fighting capabilities of the service, and the unprecedented storage capacity of 1 gigabyte. A formal release date hasn't yet been set. "We're trying to fundamentally change the way people use mail," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of products at Google. Rosenberg explained the company wants to free people from the need to file e-mail or deciding what should be deleted and what should be kept. To do that, he said, "you have to marry search with a very, very deep storage level." Google intends to include contextually targeted advertising within the Web e-mail client, a move likely to raise privacy concerns. To target ads, Google's technology will scan the text of the e-mail, map the content to a keyword, and serve an AdWords ad accordingly. The technique is similar to what Google uses for its AdSense program, which distributes ads to publisher sites. Anticipating concerns, Google assures users computers, not humans, analyze e-mail content to determine what ads to serve.