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If you haven’t heard about Google Voice, you will. If you’re not excited about it, you should be. This new Internet phone service offers a number of features that will change how both businesses and consumers view voice communications.

In a nutshell, Google Voice a front-end for all of your phones. It assigns you a new phone number which you can then use as your primary number. You then get to decide who gets routed to which of your phones, either individually or by using groups. Next, you can personalize voicemail greetings depending on the caller.

Say you’re going to visit some relatives who live out to the boonies. Unfortunately, you are way out of cell range and expecting an important business call, or you need to be reachable in case of an emergency.

Traditionally, you would need to inform the calling party of your relatives’ phone number. With Google Voice, you simply create an entry with your relatives’ digits and specify which groups or individuals will automatically be routed to the new number. You can now relax knowing that you are reachable in case of an emergency, and your paranoid uncle can be assured that you didn’t advertise his number to your questionable friends.

Let’s say you meet someone at a party, and finding no good way of blowing them off, you reluctantly exchange numbers. You could set up Google Voice so that when they call, they’re immediately directed to a voice mailbox with a greeting that’s been personalized to say, “You seemed very nice, but I’m spineless and have no interest in dating you”.

Frankly, I find checking voicemail to be mildly inconvenient. It may be because of my ADD, or perhaps my tendency to find myself in noisy environments, but I’d rather to get messages in ASCII than in audio. Not everyone in my life feels the same way I do, so I get a fair number of voicemail messages.

Google Voice can transcribe an incoming voicemail message and either e-mail or text it to you. This is fantastic for messages of your long-winded mother in law, or from colleagues you can’t stand, because it lets you skim the text for important details without having to sit there listening to rambling chatter. Unfortunately, the technology isn’t quite ripe yet. Instead of “meet me at Lanesplitter Pizza on San Pablo at University”, you might get “meet me at lame spitter Pisa on some pebble adversity”. Google acknowledges the limitations of this technology and claims to be improving it.

Unfortunately for me, the cell reception at my apartment is mediocre on a good day. Fortunately, Google Voice has a ‘Call Switch’ feature. If I’m chatting it up as a walk in the door, all I have to do is press ‘*’ on my phone and my other registered phones will ring. I can pick up my home phone, and then hang up my cell, and I can continue my call uninterrupted.

Here, I’ve only scratched the surface of what Google Voice offers. In a few weeks, the Beta will be opened up to the public and you can discover first-hand how it will transform your life.

Michael Scalisi is an IT manager based in Alameda, California.

How do you find a new search engine if all you know is Google? Typing “search engine” into the usual box might lead you to Microsoft’s newly launched Bing, the combined search at Dogpile, or the former king of search, Altavista.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.

The variety of search startups is mind-boggling, and hints at the challenges Google may face staying on the bleeding edge of search innovation in the coming years. (There’s even something for micro-philanthropists: Good Search donates a penny to the charity of your choice for each search you run.)

None of the sites we sampled are likely to replace Google as your go-to search engine for general queries, or dent Google’s growing sway as the world’s information broker any time soon. But even a cursory tour will make you start to think differently about what’s possible in search, and show up some of Google’s shortcomings.

Take mobile. Google works fine on the iPhone, but for quick searches on the go, ChaCha can’t be beat. Simply text your question to 242242 and you’ll get an answer sent back to you.

In the age of Twitter, there’s fierce competition to be the quickest indexer on the net — a feature even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits his company can improve upon. IceRocket, OneRiot and Scoopler are typical of the trend.

The smartest one we found is Collecta. It scours the net for the most recent blog posts, news stories, tweets and comments and displays them in a continuous waterfall. It’s a torrent of information to keep track of, but if you are worried about your company’s online reputation or want the latest news on Iran, it’s indispensable.

Keeping tabs on local news and events isn’t easy — even in the days of news aggregators. Enter Trackle. Think of it as a standing search engine that will notify you of news and events you want to know about. Want to follow stocks, know the weather, find news about your neighborhood, buy a treadmill on Craigslist, follow the big game while at work or find deals on specific products? Trackle searches constantly for you and sends you emails or text messages (your choice) when Apple stock falls or your team scores a run. The interface is clunky, but the idea of a search robot beats the hell out of an RSS feed any day.

Want to learn about a general topic such as the Iranian revolution or paella? Try Kosmix.com, which relies on services around the web — like Wikipedia and Flickr — to compile web pages stocked with useful and relevant information.

Some of the most interesting search engines we found are those that focus on a narrow niche and deliver in-depth targeted results on very narrow topics. Familiar examples are travel sites like Orbitz and Kayak, which search multiple databases to find cheap airfares and hotel rooms.
Newcomer Voyij.com is a travel sale search engine that looks exclusively for deals departing from your home city. The site’s focus is more on people ready for an adventure than on business travelers looking for a cheap ticket. The top return on a recent search for Chicago vacation packages was $193 per person for a two-night trip to Bloomington, Minnesota, staying at the the Ramada at the Mall for America. If a mall with a waterpark isn’t your thing, you can shell out about $25 a piece more for a trip to Minneapolis where you’ll stay at the Millennium Hotel. (Yelp to see if it’s any good).

Don’t even have the scratch for trips at those prices? Try Indeed.com, a meta-search engine for job hunters. When you get to the interview, fire up Parkingspots.com to find the best place to put your car.

Want to see a concert to celebrate your new job? Pick up a ticket using meta-search eninges FanSnap.com or ZebraTickets.com.

Some search innovators are tackling interface design to help take some of the guesswork out of search links. If you’re looking for something visual — say Michael Jackson moon walking — try Searchme.com, which shows entire web pages in its results as if they were album art in iTunes.

For music, try Fizy.com or head to video search engine Blinkx.com to navigate your way to streaming songs you can’t find anywhere else.

When it comes to modern web searching algorithms rule the roost, and attempts to improve results with an assist from the people who use them have generally failed. Google’s search wiki feature has not gained much traction and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s human-powered search engine went out of business.

But that’s not stopped a handful of companies from trying to one-up Google by inserting a human element into search.

Scour, a customizable meta search that let you choose which of the Big Three’s (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) search results should be favored, and lets you mark sites as spam and add comments. Xmarks.com takes its popular bookmark synchronization browser plug-in and uses that data to overlay information on search results from the big search engines.

Hunch, the much-hyped site started by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, doesn’t want to be a search engine at all. Like Microsoft’s Bing, Hunch is supposed to be a “decision engine” that cuts through the deluge of web data to give answers. You tell it a bit about yourself (such as a favorite historical figure) and it will try to help you decide whether to get a 50lb mutt or a pedigree, designer Puggle. It’s entertaining, but so far its suggestions aren’t impressive.

Supernaturalrecipes.com and foodblogsearch.com are cooking search engines that cut through unfiltered recipe search results with handpicked sites delivered through a custom Google search engine. Both have good result if you are looking for a good gnocchi recipe or if you need a recipe to take care of all that basil and couscous in your house.

Then there are search engines that mean business.

Take Spyfu.com, for example. This little secret agent focuses on Google’s AdWords program and will tell you what keywords your competitors bid on, how much they pay per click and what the search volume is for various search terms. It feels illegal and is totally fascinating. Check out how much GM used to spend on little text ads before its recent crash. For serious advertisers, there’s a premium version too.

Panjiva.com tracks overseas factories and their U.S. customers by indexing publicly available customs data. It’s a great way to keep track of where your competition is getting their products made and by whom. But more importantly, it’s an amazing demo of what can be done with open government data, and one should expect to see more examples like it, now that the feds have committed to sharing raw data with the nation via Data.gov.

Got your own favorite that we missed? Drop us a note in the comments.

Google has launched its SMS service and a new SMS-based classifieds system in Uganda, in collaboration with the Grameen Foundation and mobile operator MTN Uganda.

The offerings are aimed at helping poor farmers and other underserved communities access information using mobile phones, which they may own or borrow from small businesses that sell phone use.

The SMS service lets people send text messages with certain keywords to get information in a number of categories. Farmer’s Friend offers agricultural advice and weather forecasts. In a video posted on the Google.org blog, one farmer used the service to discover that rather than pay for a pesticide for his tomatoes, he could use materials that he already had on hand in excess. He says he used the money he saved to buy more land.

Health Tips and Clinic Finder are two other SMS services that let people find sexual and reproductive health information and find nearby clinics.

People use the service by texting a keyword like “weather” or “clinic” followed by the city. They get the information they request by return SMS.

The Google Trader service lets people sell or buy crops or other items. For example, a user would text “BUY Toyota Kampala” to receive a list of Toyotas for sale within 50 kilometers of Kampala, Uganda.

The services don’t come with additional fees beyond standard text messaging rates.

The Grameen Foundation, started by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who created the Village Phone project in Bangladesh, spearheaded the text service as a way to deliver information to people who live in remote areas. Village Phone is the project that turns primarily poor women in developing countries into entrepreneurs by offering them micro-loans to buy a cell phone that they let other villagers use for a fee.

Those operators in Uganda have been trained to use the new SMS service, so they can sell it to their customers.

Grameen set out to develop a way to offer people in remote areas access to information that many people in the developed world take for granted. “There’s this great idea of rolling out a lot of computers, but it’s hard to figure out a business model and how to keep those devices charged when they’re off the grid,” said Peter Bladin, founding director of the Grameen Technology Center and executive vice president for programs and regions at the Grameen Foundation, in a recent interview. “But the mobile phone is one device that already has incredible penetration.”

However, most phones used in the developing world don’t have the capability to surf the Internet, and the networks they run on don’t support Internet access either. As a result, Grameen began investigating ways to let people use SMS, which is available on even the lowest-cost phones and the oldest mobile-phone networks, to access information.

Bladin has high hopes for the initiative. “Devices or technology can shorten that gap between where the information exists and where people who need it are. That’s really a great empowerment,” he said.

For all the hoopla over Google Voice, I have to wonder why it’s such a big deal. Have people never heard about RingCentral before? Yes, I know we’re talking about Google, which apparently makes it an instant hit, but most of the features have been available for years.

As a RingCentral customer, I’ve had most, maybe all the important features of Google Voice for three or four years. And I have features–like multiple local numbers in different calling areas–that I haven’t seen mentioned for Google’s service.

What’s the difference between the two services? Price: I pay about $200 a year for RingCentral, while Google Voice will be free, at least in the beginning. There are also important feature differences that I’ll describe in a moment.

Pricing alone makes Google attractive for me as a home user, but having an 800-number, plus local numbers in several cities, makes RingCentral worth paying a premium for in my business.

RingCentral is also selling multi-line systems, allowing a virtual company to use a single virtual PBX system. This further distances RingCentral from Google Voice, at least for the time being.

I have not actually used Google Voice, except as a caller. My invitation has yet to be sent, though I work with people who already use the service and are extremely happy with it. Much as I am extremely happy with RingCentral.

I am not as happy with AT&T’s Unified Messaging, which I am also using. It is connected to my home phone line and will be disconnected as soon as Google Voice can replace it.

What I like most about both RingCentral and Google Voice is their shared ability to ring multiple phones in an attempt to find me. I also like being able to screen calls by listening to an incoming voice message while it is being recorded, and then answer if I want to.

I used to do that with an answering machine and the Google Voice/RingCentral feature is only slightly less useful as you have to answer the call to hear the caller leaving the message.

Google has recording features–sure to be used in ways people will regret–that RingCentral lacks as well as speech-to-text conversion. GVoice also allows specific greetings for specific callers.

The ability to turn voice messages into text and deliver it as e-mail is a Google Voice feature that many people are going to find useful, and something else RingCentral lacks.

Overall, Google Voice is more feature-rich, an issue RingCentral will have to address in order to justify its pricing.

Or maybe it won’t have to. Google could get into trouble if its free pricing forces competitors out of business. Maybe RingCentral and its ilk won’t get bigfooted by Google after all, though it’s pretty hard to compete with free.

David Coursey tweets as techinciter. E-mail him from www.coursey.com/contact.

This is my first time being a father for Father’s Day, so it is a bit different for me now. I am about to go to sleep here on the East Coast but many of the logos from the search industry are live now. Including logos from Google, Yahoo, AOL, DogPile and others. Here is a quick run down, which I hope to update tomorrow, when more logos and themes go live (specifically from Bing and Ask.com).

The world weaves odd, strangely patterned webs.

Last September, a 14-year-old boy told police in Groningen, Holland, that he had been knocked off his bike and robbed of some money and his cell phone.

What evidence did he have of his alleged assailants? Very little.

Six months later, the Associated Press reports, he was pootling around on Google Street View when he saw an image of himself–and of two males behind him, who, he seemed to remember, were just in the place where he was allegedly robbed.

So he called the police again.

Paul Heidanus, a spokesman for the Groningen police, told the AP that the police had to make a formal request to Google in order to obtain the unblurred photo from Street View.

“The photo could provide an important contribution to solving a crime,” he said.

The police subsequently arrested twin brothers, one of whom was allegedly recognized by Groningen’s robbery squad.

But here’s what I would love to know: what was the 14-year-old alleged victim doing on Google Street View six months after the alleged event? Why pick that moment to return to the scene of the alleged crime?

And, secondly, what was the kind and sensitive Street View driver doing at the time of the alleged incident? Did the driver really just miss it?

Google Inc. said Friday that it was working to block pornography reaching users of its Chinese service after a mainland watchdog found the search engine turned up large numbers of links to obscene and vulgar sites.

Google said in a statement that company officials had met government representatives “to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches.