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By Paul Festa, 1 April 2004 09:07

NEWS Google, the company that made off with the search market, is setting its sights on free email.

The company said on Wednesday will launch a test with about 1,000 invited guests to try out a new e-mail service called Gmail.

Google, which made its name in search but has added numerous services, such as a news aggregation page and a newsgroup interface, says that Gmail is search-based email.

Like Yahoo! Mail and MSN Hotmail, Gmail will let users search through their email. Unlike those competitors, though, Google will offer enough storage so that the average email account holder will never have to delete messages.

Hotmail currently offers 2MB of free email storage. Yahoo! offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit.

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in web pages to email.

"The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever," said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. "You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past."

When asked whether Gmail represented further evidence that Google is muscling in on the turf of Yaho!o, MSN and other web portals, Rosing demurred.

"The way we'd like to say it is that part of our mission is to organise and present all the world's information, and email's part of that information that currently is not well organised. That is the rubric under which we offer this."

Paul Festa writes for CNET News.com