Shocking no one, or very very few people, Google turned off its SMS search service on Friday. Reports of the outage have begun to sloooowly trickle in on Google forums and Reddit, but for the most part the spacetime continuum seems to be holding up.
Google created SMS Search as a way for users with limited or no data on their phones to access search information. You could text a search query to 466453 and receive an SMS reply containing only text, no links. It was useful to a lot of people back in the day, but it’s not surprising that the service has been losing popularity. A Google employee finally commented on the situation in a forum thread:
Hi everyone,
Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives.Thanks,
Jess
Fine. Be like that Jess.
All that level-headed, allocation of resources mumbo jumbo doesn’t change the pain people FEEL INSIDE. [Ubergizmo, TechCrunch]