September 8, 2006
The answer is just a text message away
The Guardian writes about the surprising success of search queries by SMS.
"Thanks to amazing search engines such as Google, we can get answers to almost any question for nothing. As they move into news, blogs, videos and books you would think that no company would dare to charge any more.
The irony is that one of the fastest growing industries at the moment involves paying for questions to be answered through text messages. The two main companies in the UK have already received 4m questions and say the market is roughly trebling in size every year.
You write your question as a text of not more than 160 characters and send it as a £1 premium text to a company that employs experts who claim to text an answer back within five or 10 minutes. This is too long for a pub quiz, but there is clearly a big market out there for people wanting questions answered."
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