Worthwhile Google Initiative

So my antitrust (and secured transactions) teacher, Professor Picker, loves Google Book Search (which kicks the shit out of Amazon's crappy, no-good version) and has been thinking a lot about it (post on Google Book Search - and another post on Google Book Search). I stumbled upon another awesome Google service today: text messaging for information. Using your cell phone, just send a text message to 46645 (the numbers corresponding to GOOGL). Google will respond with a text message within a few minutes (a few seconds, in my experience).

So for instance, if you send a text message to 46645 with the message, "100 USD in Indian rupees," you will get a text-message a few seconds later saying "Currency Conversion: 100 U.S. Dollars = 4410.92144 Indian rupee." You also get a legal disclaimer message a few seconds later (speaking of which, I'm not liable if you use this information, which is stale by now).

Better yet, if you enter "pizza 60637," it will return a listing of restaurants serving pizza in the zip code 60637. Same with movies, movie times, directions, etc. Here's a how-to page.

The service is free beyond whatever your phone company charges for text-messaging. It's awesome stuff like this, I presume, that is driving Google's stock price through the roof, though this doesn't seem to get them any revenue. By the way, you can text-message 46645 with the message "goog" and see a (not necessarily up-to-the-minute) price for Google stock (works for any stock). 466.25 (not liable)! Holy shit.

[UPDATE: added links]