Search engine giant Google has started selling expanded online storage, aiming at users with huge picture, music or other video file collections. The annual prices set were $US20 ($24) for 6GB of online storage, $US75 for 25GB, $US250 for 100GB and $US500 for 250GB.

Google further stated that the paid storage could be used across many Google online products, including photo site Picasa and other email service such as Gmail. The online storage would soon as well work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the company's word processing and spreadsheet tools.

Gmail users presently get about 3GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1GB. The extended online storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a specific service. Yahoo and AOL by now provide unlimited free storage for their email services.