Free 411

Andrew Roth over at the Club for Growth blog has a post about the free 411 service, 1-800-FREE411. I haven’t tried that service, but apparently it works like the regular 411 service except that you have to listen to a 12 second ad before you get your information. And its free.
That sounds like a cool service, but as someone who has to look up a lot of phone numbers and addresses while out and about I like Google’s SMS service much better. Using it is simple. You just text a search to Google’s SMS number (46645, or GOOGL on your keypad) and they text the results back to you in a couple of seconds.
For instance, if your friend has a publicly listed phone number all you would have to do is text “freinds name city, state” to 46645 and in a few seconds Google will send back to you the phone number and address.
Not bad. Of course, if your friend has a common name in a big city (John Smith in Milwaukee WI, for instance) you’re going to run into problems. Not sure how to get around that. But it does work well for businesses as well.
You can do other searches too. If you put in “population Bismarck, ND” it will send you back the population.
Its a cool service.