Look-up phone number with Google

[recycle]

Do you ever get a phone call from a number you don't recognize, and look it up in Google afterward if they don't leave a message? Well I do all the time. It would be awesome if you could automate that: for missed calls, click on something and it will do a Google search for the number. I would find that immensely useful.

Thanks!

[Chris]

I added this as a feature request in our tracking system. Thanks for the suggestion--keep them coming!

[jongpie]

Just ran across this request, and that I'd voice my opinion that this sounds like an awesome idea. I do the same thing when I get a call from an unknown number. Having it built into VoiceCentral would be incredible.

[Chris]

I added a +1 to the feature request for this. To clarify, how do you guys generally search for a phone number? Specifically, is there a format that tends to work best: (404) 555-1212 vs. 404-555-1212? Also, Google has the PhoneBook feature that allows you to look up numbers but I'm not sure it's any better than doing a web search for the number. Any luck using that?

[jongpie]

I typically don't user any special characters, and Google figures out that it's a phone number. For example, I'll search 4045551212 - Google still returns results where it's formated as (404)555-1212 or 404-555-1212, etc.

And since almost no one adds the +1 on the their phone number on their websites (if it's a business, etc.), I don't include it in my searches.

As far as Google's phonebook feature, I honestly always forget that they have it. But I did a quick search for a local number - the phonebook feature didn't find anything, but doing a standard search in Google returned links for a WhitePages.com page that info on the number.

Hope this helps! The more I think about this, the more it seems like it might be difficult to do. But if you think it's feasible, that'd be great!

[recycle]

I generally search as 212 555-1212. Leaving out the parens would seem to give you more potential hits (it catches numbers both with and without them in my experience). I leave the dash between the 555 and 1212 since phone numbers would never lack it and it narrows the results to phone numbers more than general numbers. I don't use a dash after the area code because that would seem to miss numbers with parens.

Google search may be smart enough to deal with phone numbers in any format though -- I've never really experimented. I just figure my approach would give you the broadest range of hits.