Use Live Search via SMS on Vodaphone in India

sms-kl You are out with your friends and have a need to find something (e.g. chinese restaurant in the vicinity)… what do you do? call a friend? or if ur uber geeky, launch a search using GPRS on live or google… what if ur somewhere between the geekdom and dummyzone?

You search for stuff by sending SMS and getting results over SMS as well.. this is SMS Search for Vodafone customers in India powered by Live Search.

Vodafone subscribers can simply type in their query as a SMS text message on their mobile handset and send to 55060. . this SMS search will set you back by 30 p/ query (all inclusive) making it cheaper than ur regular SMS at Rs 2/ SMS!

However, note that this search is not comprehensive. It appears that it is delivering only city specific information e.g. “Chinese restaurant delhi”… the local search/directory information is available in 8 major cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad with 21 more cities expected to go live soon.

however, the search results for most of normal terms will return nothing to you e.g. i tried “what is SAS drive” and that returned - “No results found..”..  the SMS search is obviously a very small portion of the Live Search experience… IMHO, it would have been better to enable it to search everything rather than maiming it to return only local directory information.

Some under the hood features include results based on the user’s city location, keeping track of user’s search session for 24 hours and delivering results formatted to match the user’s phone capabilities.. all this development was done at MS India Dev Center in Hyderabad...

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