The new service also differs from Blogger, which offers easily updated weblogs with RSS feeds for easy syndication in newsreaders and web aggregators. Page Creator uses an Ajax-based application to build static pages, which will be crawled by Google within a few hours of publication, but receive no preferential treatment in Google search results, according to the service’s FAQ. Google Page Creator doesn’t currently offer the ability to add domain names to the accounts (as opposed to a googlepages.com URL), but hinted that it may introduce domain support in the future. Each account offers up to 100 megabytes of web space, and requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or Firefox 1.0 or higher, with JavaScript and cookies enabled.

The prospect of a Google free hosting service has been a source of concern for some in the web hosting industry, who worry that Google’s strong brand identity might drain off potential prospects. In recent months major hosting providers have raised the specs on their cheapest shared hosting accounts, offering up to 5 gigs of web space and 250 gigs of monthly data transfer.

The early hours of the beta raised privacy concerns about the use of the publisher’s gmail address in the URL, which could provide spammers with a way to harvest Gmail logins.