Don’t walk, Sprint to Mobile search According to this story, Sprint Nextel is launching a Mobile search service Monday that’ll work on about 20 of its phones. For $2.99 a month, users can “Find It” – “It” meaning “driving directions, movie times, ATM locations, and restaurants” in and around their immediate neighborhood. Find It uses the same technology ordinarily reserved for helping rescue teams find lost cell users in the middle of the woods to advise customers as to which pizza parlor is closest; Partner Infospace will deliver directory info and downloadable software to the service. “Interestingly,” says the article, “maybe even creepily – even if users don’t quite know where they are, their phones will.” Hey, better to have the phone know than to have no idea at all.

There’s calm in your eye Via Search Engine Roundtable: a discussion thread at the Search Engine Watch Forums talks about Yahoo’s efforts to help out Gulf Coast businesses devastated by last year’s hurricane. Yahoo! employees “from around the country” are teaming up with Bell South representatives April 7 to help area proprieters the way they know best – getting them set up online. “You’ll be eligible for up to $1500 worth of free online services. We’ll help you create a web site, build e-commerce offerings, and launch search advertising programs to promote your products and services on the Web.” For more information, check out the Back in Business with Yahoo! page here.

In lighter news…Google Blog temporarily much lighter Jen Slegg has a blow-by-blow account of the official Google Blog’s mysterious disappearance last night. Rumors had spread on Digg and elsewhere that someone had guessed the password or otherwise hacked the site when this message appeared at the blog’s address:

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3

(P.S. Just to clear things up, I’m not associated with Google at all. I just wanted to take advantage of this before someone else with less worthy intentions did. The username was giving a 404, so I tried registering a new blog with it. Surprisingly, it worked. Oh, and no posting URLs in the comments or else they’ll be deleted.)

The cause of the outage? Google, uh, deleted it. Whoops.

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