Will “m-Googling” become searching’s new slang?

The fact that Google’s brand name has become a common synonym for the service it provides might seem like the ultimate victory of marketing, but competition for the search engine market is only getting hotter. Yahoo nearly quadrupled its profit in the third quarter, and Google is searching like mad to find new differentiators before its rivals do. Its latest move is into mobile phones.

In October, Google launched a beta trial of text messaging versions of some of its Web-searching services. Two of the first allow Google SMS users to search white- and yellow-page directories. As with the PC-based “Google Local” service, users looking for the nearest pizza joint can simply text the word pizza and their own ZIP code to retrieve a list of restaurants complete with addresses and phone numbers. Users can also look up word definitions, area codes, ZIP codes and other “snippets”—whatever text their handsets can pinch out of a Web site. (Google gives as examples factoids like city populations and brief encyclopedic summaries).

Aside from the obvious power of the irrepressible Google brand, perhaps the most compelling aspect of these services is the price: they’re free. Users only pay the usual fees they pay for any text messages. In addition to causing some consternation among wireless carriers such as Verizon Wireless that charge for similar content, Google’s SMS giveaway may catch the attention of wireline carriers in particular because they make about $6 billion a year from 411 directory services, according to The Pierz Group. What portion of that sum Google’s SMS could vaporize is anyone’s guess.

But how will Google make money from this venture? According to a company spokeswoman, “We don’t develop products for monetization purposes. We develop them because they’re useful to people.”

While that concept might not go over well with shareholders, it’s certainly true that Google isn’t in the habit of charging its users for services. And in this case, Google doesn’t even have a mechanism to bill consumers.

“Google’s strategy from the get-go is not to build users, it’s really to build people who want to display content on their site,” said Teney Takahashi, a market analyst for The Radicati Group. “That’s really where they’ve been most successful—developing an enormous user base and then leveraging that user base to attract advertisers. I think that might be a more consistent way for them to generate revenue.”

The question Google won’t answer yet is how it might apply its PC-based revenue streams to mobile phones. Its SMS searches for pizza joints aren’t accompanied by ads or returned in any order that favors advertisers, Google said—at least not yet. The spokeswoman said Google could eventually consider supplementing SMS results with ads, “if users think it’s helpful.”

Google has no set timetable for the duration of the beta test and will make a decision based user feedback. If the company gets any traction at all, rivals such as Yahoo are likely to follow.

But for the moment, Takahashi said, “Google kind of beat them to the punch.”—Ed Gubbins