gmail: the conversation

In a previous posting, I was referring to possible ways email clients would soon start to find new ways to help us organize the massive number of emails that we exchange every day. These days the hottest water-cooler topic is how to be invited to gmail. Gmail is the new web-based email system from Google (beta release). It turns out I was invited to join and have been experimenting with my new account:

• Conversations: although this is hardly a new feature, I'm wondering if Google will be pushing the limits of this feature to support more advanced features to recognize more complicated meta-structures of conversations. Right now, it just groups all related emails under a single entry in the inbox.


• Powerful search: obviously, being Google, they had to rely on their powerful search technology to make finding emails easy. But considering that their search algorithms are mostly developed to define relevancy of a particular target based on links from other pages (see Better than Google), I'm wondering what could make their email search any more sophisticated than the average algorithm? Could it be that they have created a similar algorithm that searches a particular phrase within your inbox, using the way such element is referenced by other conversations to decide relevancy? This may be the whole reason they don't want you to delete any emails, so their algorithms can create a search space with sufficient "links" to provide good results. No wonder they give away 1Gb of space!