Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Texting Google.

Google makes itself pretty darn accessible from a mobile phone! You can interact with many of their services via SMS or "short messaging service"

What's really cool is that you can query their search engine and more without ever needing to fire-up a mobile web-browser. I like to think of SMS as the command line of your mobile computing experience. There's a certain elegance in it's simplicity.

Text your Search to "466453"

(spells "Google" on most devices)

A couple of tips & cool search commands/shortcuts:

  • To perform a local search, text the keyword of what you want to find (e.g. Bars, Night Clubs, Pizza, etc) followed by the location (name of city, or more specifically, zip code) You can separate business and location by using a period, space, or comma, but google recommends a period for accuracy (Ginos Pizza.Chicago -vs- Gino's Pizza Chicago)
  • "D" before a word is the "Define" operator - (Easier then searching dictionary.com from a mobile browser)
  • "W" before a location (city, town, ZIP) is the "Weather" query operator -(A fast forecast)
  • Calculator also works. This is probably moot since most Cell phones worth their salt have a calculator in them, but if you don't and you're in need, just "text" your equation to Google and you'll get the answer right back. Works for Currency / Metric Conversions as well (e.g. 1 US pint in liters, 8 USD in Yen) Pretty slick!

There's a list of more commands + a really cool "demo" of how it works with a little onscreen cell phone interface here.

There's also been some really good stuff in Lifehacker on checking & updating your Google Calendar via SMS too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Text message your search query to 466453 ('GOOGLE' on most devices) and we'll text message back results.

You typed: 4664543

Anonymous said...

I once tried to use it in the UK and it got us so lost we almost missed a dinner party. That was 2 years ago though, so hopefully they worked out the kinks.