A few weeks ago, Harvard senior Patricia Raciti found herself in an unfamiliar area of Boston, wondering how to make it back to the bus stop where she usually catches a ride home from work. All she knew was the name of the hotel across the street from the bus stop. So she whipped out her phone, tapped in the hotel's name and sent it as a text message to Google. Within seconds the search engine came back with the hotel's location.
Like thousands of others, Raciti has become a daily Google texter, ever since she discovered the mobile search service on Google's Web site earlier this month. "My phone doesn't have Internet, so this is the answer," she says.
Mobile search is poised to become the next big offshoot of the profitable pool of Internet search. The numbers are there: The U.S. has 180 million cell phone users compared to 125 million PCs. The only hitch is that U.S. cell phone users are still relatively uncomfortable with using their phone for anything but making calls, largely because the phone's small screens make searching the Web difficult, at least compared with big handhelds such as the Palm Treo and Research in Motion's (nasdaq: RIMM - news - people )BlackBerry.
But SMS, or short messaging service, could change that. SMS was developed in the early '90s and allows users to send messages up to 160 characters using mobile gadgets. "Texting" in a search request with SMS is a snap to learn. SMS already has a heavy following in Asia and Western Europe. Europeans alone exchanged 239 billion such messages last year, up from 100 billion in 2001. Brits and Continentals use SMS to locate late-night taxis, check their bank balances and receive alerts about new tour dates for their favorite bands.
http://www.forbes.com/2005/08/03/goo...ogy_newsletter
This is the first I've heard of this. Check out Google for instructions:
http://www.google.com/sms/
Has anybody tried this? I just may have to get some text minutes on my plan.
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