With an initial public offering looming later this year, search giant Google already is exhibiting an inclination to diversify beyond its core market, unveiling plans Thursday for Gmail, a free
search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email per user. Google said the idea began from a kvetch from a
Google user and expanded into an intellectual pursuit among Google's engineers that has blossomed into what Google Co-Founder Larry Page describes as a service that is "fast and easy and has all the
storage I need. And I can use it from anywhere." Google said a handful of users would begin testing a "preview version" of the service today. The company did not expand on plans for the service, or
how it might exploit it as a business model, but given the fact that it is positioned as a "free" service, it likely would culminate as a new advertising service if and when it is deployed.
