Google SMS LogoA few weeks ago Wayne had a great article about Text Messaging and its growing prevalence throughout trucking. Even though this technology has been around for years, it is really exploding in popularity the past couple of years. Wayne did a great job talking about the advantages of text messaging, this article focuses solely on one particular “FREE” messaging application that is really invaluable.In Q1 2006 Google introduced a tool called Google SMS that has evolved today to be a robust and fully functional resource for people with cell phones on the go, e.g. truckers! Many phones have web browsing capabilities, but this is slow, cumbersome and half the times pages don’t render well on small screens. Google SMS provides a quick and efficient method for requesting and receiving information without much thinking at all.


Google SMS

What is it?

So what exactly is Google SMS? SMS Stands for Short Message Service, aka Text Messaging. The premise of the tool is simple, you send a short text message to Google, and Google responds back almost instantly with your answer. On average, a request takes 10-15 seconds to get a response back.

How do you use it?

In order to send a message to Google SMS, you simply send a text message to GOOGLE (466453). If you visit the Google SMS homepage, you can see a brief listing with some examples and even use an interactive demo. They are very intuitive to figure out the proper way to send a message to Google, and at anytime you can always just send a message with the text “help” in it to get started.

You can get answers for anything from weather, to sports scores, to driving directions to local movie listings, all with simple text messaging.

An example message you would send to get the weather for Indianapolis would be “weather indianapolis” and within a few seconds you’d have all the details about the weather forecast in the form of a text message. If you knew the zip code you could use it instead of the city. They even have shortcuts for some requests like weather so all you need is to put a “W” such as “w Indianapolis” and you’d get the same information back as if you had typed in “weather Indianapolis.”

It truly is amazing how many things you can find out just making a simple query via your phone to Google. I’d suggest popping over to the Google SMS home and checking out the search examples and try sending a few in to see just how easy it is to use this valuable resource.