Google Mobile SMS

For those of you who haven't noticed yet, the good people at Google are exceedingly interested in mobile technology. Maybe you suspected this when you were asked to give your cellphone number in order to signup for a Gmail account? You may have spotted even more evidence on Google’s official blog. As far as I’m concerned, John Battell’s 2006 predictions (see #13) is sufficient evidence that there is a stirring interest in mobile technologies.

In this post I’m going to provide a brief synopsis of the services Google is providing for the mobile marketplace. If you don’t find sufficient details in this post, and would like to dig deeper, mobile.google.com is a good starting place.

Several services Google has already developed for your mobile device:

• Google Personalized Homepage – Create a homepage with the data you want to see. Then browse to that page from your mobile device. This can really save you some time and energy by assembling many different data sources into one central destination.
  
  
• Gmail – Access your Google email account from your cellphone or mobile device.
  
  
• Local – View maps and satellite imagery or get driving directions from mobile local.
  
  
• SMS – Get short result data including: stock quotes, definitions, conversions, and more.
  
  
• Web Formatted – View web pages optimized for your mobile device.
  
  
• XHTML – Get full google search results formatted for your mobile device.
  

Of these services, I like the results that can be achieved with SMS and XHTML. I liked the results from SMS so much that I decided to do some page scraping as a means of providing a more convenient interface to test the SMS functionality. (Disclaimer: The purpose of this is strictly educational and is in no way an attempt to violate any of Google’s copywrite policies.) Unfortunately, I do not have a mobile device that is internet ready but I wanted to do some extensive querying to the SMS database to analyze the results and provide commentary on the quality and relevancy of different search phrases.

The demo that Google provided does not have a sufficient layout for this purpose, so I created a page to simplify the search process. The web page, which can be found here , allows you to search the SMS database, and returns the results in simple plain text output. Try a few different types of searches to get a feel for the wealth of data that is available. Keep your eyes peeled as Google is sure to release more great services for your mobile device.

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