Cell Phone Search Engines
I just found out about search engines that you can access on your mobile phone without having to use internet services. In Tony Vincent’s learninginhand.com blog, he posted an article called
800-GOOG-411, Texting GOOGLE CHACHA, and 800-2CHACA. In it he talked about Google’s toll free information number (businesses only) and automated search engine that you can access through SMS, or texting.
What impressed me, though, was ChaCha, the free search engine that employs real people. According to Tony Vincent, I can text ChaCha any question and someone will search the internet for me and text a response back (standard texting charges apply). Granted, if we were in a classroom setting, I would be teaching my students how to gather this information for themselves, but Vincent suggested that this tool would be most helpful on class field trips. So, say I take my choir on a trip to New York and while we’re standing on Broadway, someone wants to know what the longest running Broadway show was. Theoretically, a quick text to ChaCha would give us an answer. Now, Vincent did warn that ChaCha doesn’t always send back accurate answers, so I could tell the students to take each answer with a grain of salt until we got a chance to research it for ourselves, but still, to have this resource available anywhere is an amazing thought!
I decided to check this service out for myself. I sent a text to 242242 asking “How many cups are in a pint?” It took about five minutes to get a real response (they do send and auto response explaining that they will get back to you and you can text the word “hint” for tips on how to maximize your ChaCha experience) and eventually I got a text that said “there are two cups to a pint.” Cool! I did text the word “hint” back to them and learned that I can ask for weather conditions by typing “w zipcode” which I did promptly. This was the response:”Topeka Kansas is currently 82 degrees. There many be scattered thunderstorms later tonight. Thanks for using ChaCha!”
No. Thank you, ChaCha. . . .
June 21st, 2008 at 9:58 am
Interesting, as I am all for FREE in the technology world. I can not wait to try it out myself.