The "Search Wars" have been reaching near-apocalyptic heights as of late, to the point where it's unfolding in near-realtime. The most significant announced factor, though, is perhaps Google's GMail, still not available to the full public in Beta form (perhaps wizened by the rough launch of Orkut) but already generating enormous amounts of buzz and scrutiny. Especially worrisome to privacy experts is that Google crawls GMail to provide relevant contextual ads to accompany viewed mails. according to Phil Wolff's "a klog apart" weblog GMail will also provide Google with better scoring of web links in its general search engine gained by crawling mails for link references. GMail's key strength is that it allows people to search for mail using its leading technologies, and then provides mails in appropriate context with related mails. GMail is a bold move, but privacy concerns aside (tell me how private my own inbox is these days with tons of spam inundating it), it's an enormous move in the right direction towards true "Personal Knowledge Management" (PKM) without having to rely on still-balky desktop software that has been the focus of many PKM efforts to date. With a gigabyte of promised storage for free, this is a huge blow targeted at Yahoo! and MSN that promises to be brilliantly integrated with existing services and probable desktop extensions. If those extensions include local crawling capabilities, then PKM may be ready to take on a very powerful form, indeed, potentially leagues ahead of those who insist on having to "own" content to give it value. To those of you who thought that this was all about Google becoming another online consumer portal to survive, guess again: Google is going for all of the content marbles, both individual and institutional, not caring about the where and how of content but simply applying universal principles to it that can be appreciated by audiences no matter what their personal or professional context. Many of the pieces required to do that are still very raw, but with its boldness Google may continue to sway people towards its vision before others finance their way into competition with that vision.