This week saw Google debut yet another Gmail feature, this time adding a voice calling service. Google Voice will be free for at least the end of year within the U.S. and Canada and calls to other countries will be billed at very low rates starting at $0.02 per minute.

Google tweeted that they reached 1 million calls within the first 24 hours of making the service available, a number they seem to be proud of. Time will tell if customers continue to use the service or if they find other web-based phone services such as Skype more appealing.

To increase exposure of the new feature Google has placed big red phone booths into airports and on college campuses across the U.S. The booths are equipped with Google Voice technology and give users a chance to try the service.

To explain how the service works, Google put together this fun video.

For more information you can visit the Google blog.

Google has made a major change in its search results indexing system by adopting ‘Caffeine’ web indexing. The update is anticipated to provide fresher and quicker indexing of the web content, especially dynamic pages.

This new system will provide a plethora of new changes including better indexing for video and images, higher speed and accuracy of results. Google has been preparing to launch Caffeine for almost a year. According to Google, this new system will provide almost 50% faster indexing of the web content. The new algorithms analyze and index small portions of the web on continuous basis instead of updating several layers which would take weeks at times to index new content.

According to the search giant, Caffeine is able to process hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel every second. The total space required for the indexing of the web counts to millions of gigabytes with “hundreds of thousands of gigabytes added per day”. Thus indexing algorithms needs not only to be faster but smarter as well.

The new system is also highly scalable to provide better support for the ever increasing web content. This addition will further strengthen Google’s position in the web search category while Bing tries to catch up. For more information, read the complete entry at Google blog.

Hotmail still remains the largest e-mail provider in the world with over 343 million users. However the user interface and features of Hotmail have stayed almost unchanged for several years while other email providers such as Gmail have been adding new features to their system, such as easy integration with web services and highly dynamic content.

Microsoft has decided to give Hotmail a major overhaul with a ton of new features and modifications. One of the most needed additions is Office Web Apps that lets you create, edit and share office based documents. These documents or photos can be saved in the already available Microsoft SkyDrive cache from which it can be publicly shared. The received photos can now be viewed as slideshow directly from your inbox which saves the effort of downloading them. The emails can be sent with embedded YouTube or Hulu vidoes that the viewer can watch within the e-mail. However these features require Microsoft Skylight installed in the browser.

Another exciting feature is Hotmail Highlights that gives a quick insight about the new messages with reference to sender’s identification such as FaceBook and Twitter IDs. This makes it easier to view and manager high volumes of mail. Microsoft also introduced a better protection system with full SSL protection and easy spam filtering using Swipe. Features such as content management and multiple accounts are enhanced as well.

Hotmail took some time to finally wake-up and enhance its services to compete with Gmail and others. However the new changes with certainly help the mail giant to regain the trust of its users.