Google’s SMS search has been around for quite sometime (was launched a year back),and it seems Google is now getting aggressive in promoting SMS search (asklaila Airtel deal served as a wake-up call?) – I believe, this is the first time, Google has launched a print campaign in India to promote it’s services.
The SMS search (send your queries to 9-77-33-00000) is available across all the operators, is charged the standard SMS price (no premium charges, unlike Indiatimes and others); and integrates local queries as well as different data types like weather/railways pnr search/cricket etc.
This is also a head-on competition with Indiatimes and other content portal’s sms subscription/alert service
In the past, cricket scores and astrology updates on SMS brought a smile to a lot of us until seeing the premium charges associated with short code services. And this was after we had to remember a complicated set of prefixes for different types of information.
Now send all your queries to 9-77-33-00000 without paying any premium charges! SMS Search offers an easy-to-use way to type in free-form searches. No longer will your questions require complicated prefixes or a tight syntax. – blog
For a service like this,mass adoption is a big challenge (no matter which brand you are) – and that’s why Google is resorting to traditional way of marketing (they even have hoardings in MG Road, Bangalore).
Will it fly?
What’s your take on Google’s SMS search service? Did you find it useful?
Tried the following queries and all I got was an apology (in duplicate) saying it didn’t match anything.
yellow chilli pune
mainland china pune
aundh pune restaurant
aundh italian food
I get all the right results when tried the same queries on google local.
But, I suppose it will be useful when the results are same as the ones on google local. Sometimes, firing up browser on mobile is too cumbersome.
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send more good jokes…………
I had an experience similar to the one posted by Shashikant – even apparently easier search terms did not deliver good results. But why is Google SMS Search significantly divorced from their web based local search.
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