Google appears to have shut down SMS search, without telling anyone

There goes all the information at your fingertips, says every feature phone owner who uses Google’s SMS search. According to reports, the search giant has shut down the service that allowed people to send search queries via text message by texting their queries to “466453” (GOOGLE).

Apparently the service was stopped in the last week with no word from Google until users took to forums to query the shutdown. A Google employee going by the name of Jessica S finally commented on a Reddit thread, reports TechCrunch.

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

The service is particularly useful to feature phone users with conservative data spend, and should therefore important in emerging market regions that have a high volume of feature phone users. Other SMS-based Google services such as Calendar SMS, Gmail SMS and Google Voice SMS seem to be intact and still functional.

The move to shut down the service could make sense as it was more useful in the pre-smartphone era when data plans weren’t a thing and prices were insanely high. For Google, cheaper smartphones and cheaper data could have aided the company’s decision to see the service as no longer useful.

The Silicon Valley-based tech giant has been partnering with different operators to launch free browsing areas, such as South Africa’s Free Zone, in emerging market regions. The aim of the initiative is to help people with little to no access to the internet access some of its products for free.