While in Salt Lake City last week I was looking for an address for the Market Street Grill. Cell phone in hand I sent the following SMS to Google (46645): Market Street Grill, Salt Lake City, UT. Typically a search such as this will provide you with addresses as a response. Here’s what I got:
Looking for map of ‘Market Street Grill, Salt Lake City, UT’? Sorry, map information is not available via Google SMS.
Did you guess the problem? It’s the works “street” in my search. Because of this one word, Google thought I was looking for a street and therefore a map, not the address of a business with “street” in the name. A revised search for Market Grill, Salt Lake City, UT retrieved me the answer I was looking for.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
One Reply to “Sometimes Google’s too smart”
4INFO.net (text to 44636) has a similar text message offering, but provides several additional services that Google does not: text alerts for sport scores, weather forecast, stock quotes, horoscopes, and services for player stats (“allen iverson”), flight times (“swa san jose san diego”). 4INFO recently launched the ability to make any blog or news feed accessible from a mobile phone. In a matter of minutes, you can create a keyword that your readers can search to get your latest post or sign up for text alerts.
4INFO.net (text to 44636) has a similar text message offering, but provides several additional services that Google does not: text alerts for sport scores, weather forecast, stock quotes, horoscopes, and services for player stats (“allen iverson”), flight times (“swa san jose san diego”). 4INFO recently launched the ability to make any blog or news feed accessible from a mobile phone. In a matter of minutes, you can create a keyword that your readers can search to get your latest post or sign up for text alerts.