What does Google get by offering free email service ?

Question

Google provides many services - Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Search APIs which are directly or indirectly generating lot of revenue for Google.

But what does Google gain by providing free email service with 10's of Gigabytes of space at free of cost? And I bet the number of registered users are in millions...and obviously there are several data centers established across the world to support the same!

I don't get the magic!

Answer 1

advertising.

and insight into your emailing habits

Answer 2

All your infos are belong to Google.

Answer 3

When you open an email message you can see an advertisement on the right.

Google claims that the advertisement is automated but even the anonymous statistics is useful for them as they know what to offer to you.

Answer 4

It also keeps you within the Google ecosystem. Otherwise you might go try someone else like Windows Live and then maybe try their search as well.

Their search ads are the real moneymaker.