One last Google announcement this week – US users can now send queries to the search engine via their mobile phones, and get answers back in about a minute. The service is another one of Google’s beta offerings, and as such is currently free, except for standard network charges – they’re just trying it out to see if people would use it.
Google SMS offers phone directory listings, product prices from Froogle, dictionary definitions … and a calculator. Somewhat strange given that most phones have calculator software in them already, but perhaps useful if it can deal with trigonometric functions. Oh, wait – I have a PDA for that.
Benjamin Ling, product manager for Google SMS describes the service on his blog: “Google SMS is a handy way to, say, get a listing for a nearby restaurant, find the definition of a word, or look up the price of a product, an area code or Zip code. You can even use Google SMS to calculate a tip. If your phone is enabled for text messages, just send your query to this 5-digit US shortcode: 46645. (It corresponds to GOOGL on most phones.) Your query results are sent as text messages, not links. Learn more about using Google SMS on our help page or by sending a text message with the word ‘help’ to 46645.”