Global Geek News

Google kills 1-800-GOOG-411 service

Google has just announced that it will be shutting down its GOOG-411 service as of November 12, 2010.  The service that many have come to love was a free directory assistance service that was a great alternative to paying for 411 service.  It was Google’s first real jump into the voice recognition world.

I hate to see a great free service like this go away although with the massive number of smartphones these days where you can easily look up the information you need, a service like this isn’t that useful to many people.  With many phones having voice search capabilities, I guess that is just as good and you aren’t using up any minutes in the process for those that don’t have unlimited plans.

There is one bit of bright news for those that don’t have smartphones, you can still get directory assistance by texting the name of the business and its location to 466453 (“GOOGLE”) which will return you a response with the information you are looking for (hopefully).

RIP GOOG-411

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Comments

3 responses to “Google kills 1-800-GOOG-411 service”

  1. Mahdi Avatar
    Mahdi

    And yet another great service is going to shut down, because of lousy marketing department in Google! The big problem with Google is that they don’t know how to market their great technologies and make money out of them. In this case their objection is that since they developed native apps for smartphones they don’t see any advantage in Goog-411 and therefore they won’t continue the service. I guess they should look into numbers, even in US the majority of people still use regular phones rather than Smart phones. So this is not a good excuse to abandon this great service.
    Whit this attitude, Google is going to lose its customers, especially now that they step into Enterprise with their Google Apps. With this attitude, there is no guaranty for businesses to switch to Google and layout their needs on Google Services, because Google might withdraw those services with or without any reasons. i.e. Just in May, 2010 @Google IO they announced that they are opening Google Waves for Apps’ users and couple months later they retired Wave! It’s hard to trust on experimental technologies, and that is why Google hasn’t been able to make money on most of its products except the search.
    Google! Please change this attitude!

  2. Michael Harvey Avatar
    Michael Harvey

    I had early used the 1800GOOG411 service and found it to be fairly helpful. I regret seeing the service being shutdown. Although recently I had used the toll free service of Justdial. I called up 1800-500-0000 and my queries were answered within 60 second by a real person. They also connected me to the vendor that I was looking for. Truly I think Justdial is one step ahead of 1800GOOG services.

  3. williamyoung686@gmail.com Avatar
    [email protected]

    Recently, I used the toll-free Justdial service. I called up 1800-500-0000, and my queries were answered within 60 seconds by a real person! They also connected me to the vendor I was looking for. I truly think Justdial is one step ahead of 1800GOOG services.

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