Then what other applications is Google working on?
I cannot talk in specifics. The general direction I think are some of the things that I have been talking about already: making more and more types of information available. Gmail is trying to search over private information -- that is our first real effort into that area.
What have you learnt from the negative reactions to Gmail from privacy advocates and now lawmakers?
What I have learnt is that Google plays a very important part in people's lives, and it is worthwhile for people to get worked up about. I remember the last time there was a big brouhaha over something that Google did, which was when we acquired the Usenet archives from Deja.com, and the Usenet community was all up in arms about what this meant for the future of Usenet and being able to get access to the information.
Over time, it became familiar, and they had the chance to play around with the product and see that it actually was really good. That brouhaha subsided, and I expect and hope that the same thing will happen in this case. The issues that are important to people any company should take seriously, and I feel that we are doing so.
How do you think the service might change?
It is premature for me to speculate on what changes might happen.
In the long run, what do you think will be more interesting: one gigantic search space, or lots of little ones partitioned off from one another -- different databases for this Web site or that company's e-mail archive?
From a user's point of view, you want one place you can go to do the search. I do not necessarily have a technical preference. The important thing for me is that it be as easy for the users to get the information that they want and, to me, that means they just have to only go to one place, and that one place should be smart enough to figure out, out of the zillions of different types of information sources in the world, which ones have the right results for you.
What are your ideas on the need for privacy, with search histories, registration data, e-mail documents in one place?
Well, we definitely respect the fact that the people who create the information and who own the information have the rights to decide how that information should be viewed. We give all sorts of controls to let people control very finely how their information is made available through Google. That is going to be our policy.
would you please turn off the meta-refresh?