Getting Started

You can send SMS text messages to the five-digit U.S. shortcode 46645 or GOOGL on your keypad. Receiving a return message can take some time, possibly up to a minute. Be aware that although Google provides this service at no charge, your cell phone provider may charge for both outgoing and incoming text messages. Some providers have unlimited messaging plans, while others allow a certain number of messages, both outgoing and incoming, and still others charge per message.

Sending a text message

Most cell phones today are capable of sending and receiving SMS text messages. This includes phones that are not Internet-capable. SMS does not use the Internet to transfer text messages so your phone does not need to have a Web browser or Internet capabilities.

You access the messaging application on your cell phone using the number 46645. For the text of the message, enter your query to Google. The queries are formatted in a particular manner, depending on the type of query you are sending. The various queries are explained throughout the rest of this chapter.

Tip 

Make sure your cell phone is not set up to add signatures to text messages. The signature cannot be understood and causes an error, meaning you won’t get your response.

The messages you send to Google are not case-sensitive, so don’t worry about capitalizing things like business, people, or place names. Also, don’t use any punctuation. You absolutely can’t use the following characters when sending text messages to Google: [ ] \ ^ _ { } ~ ` | .

You also will find that the period has a special meaning, used optionally in formatting a local listings query. So unless you are using it for that purpose, don’t use a period, either.

Query results

The results you receive from Google depend entirely on the type of query you send. If your query is very specific, you may get a single result, hopefully the one you want. If not, try changing your query. You receive a maximum of three results no matter how broad your query is. So if you are looking for Smith or Jones in Chicago, you may have trouble without a first name. Even then, your query may not appear in the top three results. Your query then needs to become much more specific. Each query type returns different results explained throughout the chapter.

Sometimes results are too large to fit into a single text message. This message length size is a limit of the SMS service. To overcome this limit, Google splits the results into several messages numbering them as they are sent, numbered 1 of n, where n is the total number of SMS messages that comprise the entire Google text message. For long results, such as driving directions, this means that the result could exceed the maximum number of result messages sent by Google, which is seven. In that case, your result is incomplete. Try sending a query again from a place further along your route to get the rest of the directions.