GMail first impressions
April 23, 2004I recently got a GMail account and I had a few quick first impressions.
I really like the fact that it doesn’t always put ads next to your emails. It appears that if it cannot determine a useful match to the email content, instead of displaying any old ad it just displays nothing. Very nice, I think that helps users understand how contextual the ads are when they do show up.
But the much-vaunted contextual ads aren’t always that contextual. For example, I got some email from this saleswoman at the Mitsubishi dealership where I had shopped at last night. Her email account is Hotmail, so at the bottom of her email there’s an ad that Hotmail inserts into outgoing messages. That ad was for MacAfee anti-virus. And so, even though the email itself was about Mitsubishi cars the ads I got from GMail were not about cars at all, instead they were about anti-virus products. GMail matched on the advertisement in the email, not on the actual content of the email. So it wasn’t as contextually smart as you might have expected. The saleswoman’s name is “Jade” so I’m half-expecting that the next time I get email from her, GMail will give me ads for jewelry.
One thing I definitely like is that unlike Hotmail and Yahoo, GMail only puts ads when you’re in GMail–it doesn’t insert ads into your outgoing messages. At least not in the emails I’ve sent so far.
And I’ll definitely give props to the search capability in GMail. Always been my biggest complaint about Outlook–why is it so damn slow about searching emails? The emails stay on the Exchange server, why can’t the damn server keep some kind of search index of the message store to speed up searches?
GMail puts Outlook/Exchange to shame–the search was fast and accurate. I’m definitely keeping this account just for that feature–forward all my important messages to GMail for archiving, and then search them in GMail instead of in Outlook.
It’s still a beta so I won’t give it a grade yet, but so far it’s looking pretty good.
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