P***ed off with expensive & ineffective 118 services? Google’s come up with an alternative that will only cost you a text message. Google SMS (currently in Beta) lets you get local business listings when you’re on the road and want to find a place to eat, obtain driving directions to get from point A to point B without having to ask for directions, compare online product prices with ones you find on the high street, look up dictionary definitions to expand your vocabulary or prove a point, solve maths problems such as converting to metric units. Just text your query to 64664 (or 6GOOG on most mobile phones) in the following example formats:

• (business name)or(type).(location)or(postcode) … to get business information e.g. tesco.swindon or plumber.sn2 1bs
• from (location) to (location) … for driving directions
• price (product) … for price comparisons
• define (word) … for definitions
• g (keywords) … for web snippets (first few lines of matching webpages)
• or calculator-like queries such as “5 miles in km”

However, if you are deskbound or have an internet-enabled PDA, Google Local UK is a Multimap-like local business locater service, and should provide directory listings in the familiar pin-headed mapping format.