{"id":77,"date":"2004-10-12T22:04:51","date_gmt":"2004-10-13T02:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=77"},"modified":"2004-10-12T22:18:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-13T02:18:00","slug":"welcome-to-my-google-neighborhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/welcome-to-my-google-neighborhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to my Google neighborhood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/chimprawk.blogspot.com\/\">Fred <\/a>sent out an interesting new service from <a href=\"http:\/\/labs.google.com\/\">Google Labs<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/sms\/\">Google SMS<\/a>, with which you can find addresses and phone numbers as well as services based on town and\/or zip code. You send a brief SMS message to 46645 aka GOOGL and you get results back fairly quickly.<br \/>\nOf course, I gave it a try. Sure enough I found myself as &#8220;paul jones chapel hill nc&#8221; &#8220;paul jones 27517&#8221; and by my phone number (google sms does reverse look up!). So much for the residential lookup on to Definitions!<br \/>\nI asked GOOGL to define vascular (by sending &#8220;define vascular&#8221;) and it did a fine job, then I challenged the dictionary a little with &#8220;d libertarian&#8221; and got &#8220;one who upholds and lives the principle of individual liberty and responsibility of thought and action&#8221; Not bad. How about a more complicated word like &#8220;d community&#8221;? For that I got &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cogsci.princeton.edu\/cgi-bin\/webwn?stage=1&#038;word=community\">a group of people living in a particular local area; &#8216;the team is drawn from all parts of the community<\/a>&#8221; Serviceable, but not as complex as what Google&#8217;s &#8220;define:community&#8221; gives you on the web. Both are drawing from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cogsci.princeton.edu\/~wn\/\">WordNet 2.0<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cogsci.princeton.edu\/\">the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton<\/a>.<br \/>\nOn to commercial services; this uses <a href=\"http:\/\/local.google.com\/\">Google Local<\/a>. I tried &#8220;pizza 27514&#8221; despite of the many many pizza joints in the area, the three I got were somewhat interesting &#8212; first Pizza Hut, then Alfredo&#8217;s, then Domino&#8217;s.  Next I asked &#8220;Shoes 27514&#8221; and I got a fancy and unique women&#8217;s shoe store, &#8220;Shoes at the Square&#8221;. I ramped up the challenge with &#8220;turkish.chapel hill nc&#8221; I got a place called &#8220;Turk&#8217;s Sports Food and Spirits&#8221; in Reidsville, NC and a great rug company &#8220;Nomadic Trading&#8221; in Carroboro. How about &#8220;Thai.chapel hill nc&#8221;? Better luck there. The first result was the occassionally wonderful Thai Palace just up the road. But also the Thai Garden in Raleigh.<br \/>\nOn to online prices. I think this is so you can compare a brick and mortar store&#8217;s prices with online stores&#8217;. &#8220;P optio camera&#8221; or &#8220;get the price of a Pentax Optio digital camera&#8221; gave me a series of various Optios including the 33WR Water Resistant Camera ($349.95 from Dell), the 750Z 7 megapixel ($499 from Comp-U-Plus) as well as a <a href=\"http:\/\/froogle.google.com\">Froogle<\/a> buy. As it turns out, searching on Froogle for &#8220;optio camera&#8221; gives the same first three results &#8212; duh!<br \/>\nOther features include reverse zip code look up (entering &#8220;27514&#8221; gives you a message telling you that that is a &#8220;zip code for Chapel Hill NC.), calculator and units convertor (&#8220;44 gallons in liters&#8221; gets you &#8220;44 US gallons = 166.558119 liters&#8221;), and the wonderful Google snippets (&#8220;g paul jones&#8221; gets you my home page! I am still the number one Paul Jones!).<br \/>\nEven though<a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/sms\/faq.html#troubleshooting\"> the Google SMS Troubleshooting FAQ<\/a> says &#8220;Google SMS and Treo phones don&#8217;t seem to play nicely together.&#8221; Everything worked pretty well. One confusion\/disappointment is that several messages said &#8220;(1 of 4)&#8221; yet I only received one message and occassionally two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fred sent out an interesting new service from Google Labs, Google SMS, with which you can find addresses and phone numbers as well as services based on town and\/or zip code. You send a brief SMS message to 46645 aka GOOGL and you get results back fairly quickly. Of course, I gave it a try. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}