I also hear that Google are secretly developing a special 'adult' search engine?

I've had difficulties finding it but apparently its called G-spot.

Well, it is April 1st...

Have you seen this from Google - http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html

Ashley

>and so will warez traders who will GMail being a very good
>place to store big files that they trade online.

Will it? If I were a "dodgy content" provider of whatever stripe, I certainly wouldn't let the Big G anywhere near my product. Extracting patterns from large corpuses of data is their trade, and that would be tantamount to painting a bulleye on my content, with a large "Ban me!" sign over it for good measure.

Google
>will certainly take measures to combat that but history of
>that segment shown that the only way to truly fight that
>sort of people off one needs to pull the plug - in this
>case reduce storage dramatically.

No. The only way to truly fight that segment is to make it easier for them to play honestly. I spent some time with a few reformed black hat spammers at the Orlando PubCon, and 1 in particular cites Google as the main reason for him "going straight". For the record, this was one of the few who Google really WAS out to get

He now plays the game Googles way, and is making more off them than ever. He doesn't care about coming back into the light, because ultimiately it was always about the bottom line for him. Now he uses (mostly) approved techniques, he spends a lot less time testing the hell out of everything, managing domains, running spam scripts etc and a lot more time creating and publishing content. Both sides feel they have won

bonus all round, IMO

I am highly sceptical that Google will be able to sustain this 1Gb offer unless they introduce some pretty draconian rules on daily traffic usage, thus limiting potential impact of warezing. "Dodgy" providers will certainly not shy Google just because its so high profile - in fact this high profile will make it attractive because they will seek safety in numbers.

I've been using Google for a long time now and I noticed definitive degradation in quality of results - its not completely useless but amount of noise or plain fake hits is getting very noticeable. This is the field where Google's ability to deal with massive amounts of data would be appreciated ;)

It would also be good if Google introduced PGP based security by default, but I think its wishful thinking (CPU time is far more expensive than storage).

There is another BIG question on how they are going to make money, personally I would rather not have my email analysed, ie read by anyone.

Sorry but I am very sceptical about this feature being anything but distraction from their core competency - enabling highly relevant up-todate searching.

I'm with you on this Mike.

As within MSN and Yahoo!, Google will introduce a Gmail+ paid-for service and no doubt a raft of other fee-based services. It will also get more Adwords/PPC revenue (although its hard to see what ads will be served with messages with attached meeting minutes).

I'm sure my annual e-mail is > 1Gb. I wonder how much the costs for Google would be per gig?

Yahoo! is profitable and its paid e-mail service contributes at least 10% to its revenue. With careful management, I'm sure Google can do it - the brand is certainly strong enough.

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/ar2002/fin_index_2.html

As the Yahoo! report says - its all about how skilled you are in monetising the user base. Their data shows that the ratio of unregistered to registered to registered active to registered paying is certainly challenging.

Dave Chaffey
============
Internet Marketing trainer, consultant and author
eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk

On 09:10:15 3 April 2004 mikegb wrote:
>Surely the point of it it all is to start owning the
>audience it attracts?

Well Google managed to make a lot of money without "owning" anyone, thus showing that you do not _have_ to own to be profitable. Owning your customers could be very costly, as many .com's demonstrated in what is now quickly becoming forgotten tale. Here is my email (reproduced as is) to NetMarketing list (http://www.chinwag.com/) with some calculations:

> [names removed]
> Techie geeks, feel free to give an explanation.

ok, you asked for it ;-)

> How is it logistical / technically possible to
provide potentially over
> 2 million users, with 1GB of space each!!!

Ok, lets do some calculations based on real life
data (you can skip to the end for my estimate
of costs for 1st year running for GMail):

HotMail has got at least 50 mln email accounts, I
am pretty sure the figure is well above
100 mln, however lets take "mere" 30 mln accounts.
Lets count it in terms of 300 Gb IDE
disks that cost around £150 (ex VAT). You can't
really go higher in terms of capacity per hard
disk without getting into _very_ expensive
territory.

( 30,000,000 x 1Gb ) / 300 Gb = 100,000 hard
drives required

This will have to be distributed among at least
3-5 data centers, so we have to increase
the above by appropriate factor, lets say 5, so we
now need 500,000 hard drives @
£150 each (and you wont save much because high end
drives are expensive and margins are
low in that business) you have to spent £
75,000,000 ($150 mln USD) just to get started.

Is it all? No! You have to host these hard drives
on servers. Generally speaking its 4 drives
per small 1U server that Google is using, so we
will need that many servers:

500,000 / 4 = 125,000 servers needed.

Last time I checked Google had 10k+ servers used
for searching, so they will have to increase their
capacity by 12+ times, now lets look at costs of servers.
Again last time I checked Google was using pretty
cheap hardware, but you won't go much lower than
£500 per 1U server (without hard drives):

125,000 * £500 = £62,500,000 EXTRA

Still with me? Ok, then there is rackspace rent
(this is where you keep your servers).
1 rack will host 47 (might be wrong there) 1U
servers:

125,000 / 47 = 2,659 racks needed, have not got
exact figures (please feel free to correct me) at hand but
annual lease for 1 rack in a decent place can easily cost £10k pa, so total rent is:

2,659 * £1,0000 = £26,590,000 (thats every year!)

Sub-total for the first year of running:
£164,090,000 ($300+ mln)

And then there is bandwidth (and lots of it!), but
I can't be [WordLeftToYourImagination] to do any
calculations on Friday evening as I doubt anyone would still be with me at this point :-)

So, I can see that this idea will either cost a
LOT of money _OR_ they will severely cut 1Gb
quota. Would it be worth doing this service? I am not
convinced it will be, it will sure as hell require
a lot of computing resources that will cost pretty penny,
maybe thats why they want to float, ie need money
to "invest"? ;-)

Anyway seriously (for those who still here) - on
the basis of what was publicly available
I do not think its a good idea even though I
understand Google's desire to get to talk to
customers directly. I think 1Gb limit will be
abused a lot and will effectively be out of reach
for most people due to various traffic limitations
(like you can only email 10Mb a day).

Google should focus on improving its search
engine - no disrespect to legit white
hat SEOs but widespread "search engine
optimisation" is leading to poor
or even totally faked results being well
noticeable.

regards,

Alex

P.S. Just in case Sergey Brin will be reading this
email: Privet i udachi ;-)

P.P.S. Good thing they released information about
this GMail thing on 1st of April - they could
always call it a joke...