Short message service (SMS) is ubiquitous. Now SMS not only can be used by some companies as the marketing services, or for the notification purposes, it also can be acted as a valuable service for a search engine company in delivering search results. Last month, Google India launched the SMS services to its Indian users, now it’s Google China’s turn. On a new Google China’s mobile SMS site, you’ll notice that there are variety of information requests can be done through SMS at this moment. Users can enter queries to their mobile phones and send the request to 999333, Google will reply the users with the search results in SMS format, as shown in the below picture. This service is being offered by Google China as free of charge, however users have to pay the SMS fee imposed by the carriers.

With this new offering, SMS can be used as a way to request information from Google China. Simple request such as finding the location of China’s Wal-Mart, stock price, weather, train details, etc to some complex request such as word translation, i.e. translate a sentence from Mandarin to English, or currency rate are now available. This type of service is not new in the market and I believed users have a certain level of expectation toward this SMS service, thus Google China must ensure their messages must arrive to the users in a fast manner as well as at a sensible time (for example, not until the users forgot when she sent the SMS request).