In a recent 60 minutes interview, Google co-founder Sergey Brin described a system in development by Google that would allow you to price-check an item on the Internet while you shopped in a physical store. That system has arrived in the form of Google SMS.

Google SMS is a service you can use with your SMS-enabled cell phone to get product prices, business or residential phone numbers, dictionary definitions and calculations. All you need is an SMS or text-messaging enabled cell phone.

What is SMS?

SMS is an acronym for Short Messaging Service. Also commonly referred to as text messaging, SMS allows you to send and receive short textual messages between cell phones and other services such as Google SMS.

Nearly all cell phones in use today (except for maybe that brick you bought 5 years ago) support SMS. The only question that remains is, does your phone service plan include it?

 What information can I get with Google's SMS service?

Google SMS uses a specialized subset of the Google database to return text-only results for a number of topics, such as...

• Business and residential listings from Google Local
• Product prices from Froogle
• Definitions
• Search result snippets from Google Search
• Calculations
• Area code lookups (Ever wonder what's covered under the 808 area code?)
• Zip code lookups

How to use Google SMS

Use your cell phone to compose a new text message. The details on how to do that will vary depending on your phone, so refer to your phone's manual for the specifics.

Send the message to the following number: 46645, which corresponds to GOOGL on most phones. In the message body, enter your query. You can request different types of information using shortcuts Google has developed, which are detailed below...