It’s 4 in the morning. You’ve been ought all night doing things you shouldn’t have and now you’re hungry. At that hour, choices are limited. You know that Waffle House is around here somewhere but which end of town is it on? Trying text searching (if you can still type) with Yahoo or Google. They will give you good directions.
So you remember where you are and you type in waffles (where’s the F key on this phone) and Richmond (my old haunt) and then you remember there were TWO Waffle Houses. wOOt! Old Google is better than your friend who made sure you made it home the night you don’t remember.
It’s pretty easy to handle too. The text messaging from your cell phone provides all you need. You just punch your town (Richmond, KY.) and your query (waffles) or you can tighten it up further by giving zip codes and specific names like 40475 and Waffle House.
The big issue is this is yet another way to search and another way for Google and Yahoo to wage war against one another. Both companies are looking for additional ways to increase their face time with users and this is another route.
Yuki Noguchi at the Washington Post quoted Mark Donovan of Seattle-based M:Metrics saying, “Search-by-text is a service that is expected to gain in popularity as the big search-engine companies compete to keep users of their desktop search products.”
“Mobile search is another front in that war,” said Donovan, who said he often uses the services, even while sitting in front of a computer.
As the local search becomes more of a player, this text search is liable to take off a lot more. It’s foreseen as an alternative to traditional directory assistance and it’s free at this point. This will make it an attractive feature to use in most towns and cities across the country.
One could possibly expect this as a form of paid listings in the future too. It could be reliable if the text search takes off into high numbers. Until then though, it will remain an uncluttered and simple way to find out what your own phone number is.
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
