per an anonymous hipster, i mean, tipster:

http://www.tellme.com/ has a competing free SMS directory service.

to be fair, i conducted a test by sending the exact same search to 83556 (TELLM):

university park condo chicago il

and received the following results:

Local Listings: University Park Condominium 773-324-1414 1451 E. 55th St Chicago, 60615

response time was about 10 seconds faster than google. the info returned was exactly the same, other than the fact that the phone number was listed before the address, which put it above the fold (good, in this case, since i was looking for the phone number and didn’t have to scroll down below the address to find it, but ultimately an arbitrary choice).

HOWEVER, tellme.com doesn’t do trivia like google does.

texting:

translate hello to french

to tellme resulted in an error message:

Sorry, no results. Check spelling & location and try again.

while google sent back:

Translation: ‘hello’ in English means ‘bonjour’ in French.

now, i don’t know how often i might need to translate things into french when i’m on the go, but i think for this match the score remains google: 1, tell me: 1.