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 the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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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.