You can Google for information in various way (Google is now officially a word in dictionary that means search the web with Google search engine) and beside searching, Google has various other functionality such as as a calculator too. And now you can search the web for stores and businesses in a specific neighborhood, and find the names, addresses, and phone numbers of businesses near you or in any ZIP code across the US by simply SMS Google provided by Google SMS (Short Message Service).

Google SMS

With Google SMS, you can search for the daily need information or help such as nearest hospital, how to get from a place to another place, the price of a product, the word in another language, or even results from mathematics calculation and etc. Google summarily list the items that you can search as:

* Business listings
* Residential listings
* Driving Directions
* Movie showtimes
* Weather conditions
* Stock quotes
* Q&A for broad assortment of topics, including authors, inventors, populations and more
* Product prices
* Definitions for a word or phrase
* Sports
* Search results snippets
* Calculator
* Translation
* Currency Conversion
* Area code look up
* Zip code look up

To use Google SMS, just write a text message with search query and send to “46645” (GOOGL). And the information or help you seek will be sent back to you via text message within minutes on text-based format. The feature is currently only available and works in United States and Canada only. And you may be charged by your mobile operator for SMS sent and received, although Google doesn’t charged for the query processed and SMS sent. And bear in mind that Google SMS is not a full search engine, rather just to return specific results for specific kinds of queries.

Google SMS website has sample search terms, and a web simulation demo of Google SMS supported on IE 6.0+, Firefox 1.0+, Safari 1.2.4+, Netscape 8.0+, Mozilla 1.4+ and Opera 8+

Update: SMS search has been discontinued by Google since mid 2013.