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Catching up .. Google has launched the ability to do businesses searches via voice with just a phone call. You can get a writeup of how it’s done at http://labs.google.com/goog411/ , but this is more about phone numbers than Web sites.

And the phone number to know is 1-800-466-4411 . Dial that number and first you’ll get the message that the call is being recorded. Um, okay. After that you’ll get a notice of “Goog 411 Experimental.” A nice male droid will ask you for the city and state, and then the category or business that you’re looking for. I gave it a city and state, and then, hoping to mess with it, gave the word “Thai.” Googdroid correctly started reading off Thai restaurants. As it reads results, you can use voice commands to choose certain listings. Sometimes the droid seems to have a bit of a hearing problem. As it ran down a list, I decided I wanted number five. It took several times of me repeating, “Number five… NUMBER FIVE!” to get the point across.

For each listing you can get additional details. You can also tell Googdroid “Text message” and it’ll text your phone with a business name, phone number, and address. (When I tested this I got the text messages just seconds after disconnecting.) One thing to note: Googdroid is extremely eager — in my opinion too eager — to connect your call. Sometimes all you want is the phone number, but he’s always ready with, “I’ll connect you.” I had to hang up on him when I wanted just the phone number.

This number’s going in my phone’s address book. I’m very thrilled with the number of free ways you can do business lookups now. Take that, 99 cent 411 calls!

The state of Illinois now has a Civil War Muster and Descriptive Rolls Database available at http://www.sos.state.il.us/departments/archives/datcivil.html . The direct link for searching the database is at http://www.ilsos.gov/genealogy/ .

You can search the database by the veteran’s name/partial name (you must enter at least two letters of the surname), company, unit, or place of residence. I did a search for smi . I got over 500 results (the maximum number of results you can get is 500) so I tried again, this time with owen . This time I got 284 results, covering both Owen and Owens.

Results are provided in a table showing name, rank, company, unit, and residence. (Be sure to check the ranks abbreviation list if you’re not clear on what a MUS or a UCOOK is.) Click on the name of the solider and you’ll get a page with additional personal information (eye and hair color, height, occupation, etc) as well as service information (muster in date, where they joined, when mustered out, etc.) There’s also a additional section which contains additional notes (I saw remuster dates, discharge for disability notes, death information, etc.)

The database was very quick to search but occasionally it seemed to hiccup in its searching, and I had to back all the way out to the top page and try again. This might have been just a Firefox issue.

Video search engine Blinkx ( http://www.blinkx.com ) has launched Blinkx Remote, a tool for finding TV programs (and snippets) on the Web. You can try it directly at http://www.blinkx.com/remote .

What you’ll find here is a list of browsable TV shows, from #1 Single to Zoey 101. Some of these shows have icons indicating that there are paid versions of episodes as well as full episodes available online.

Click on a TV show (I chose Space Ghost Coast to Coast) and you’ll get a preview windows, and a list of available videos with thumbnails (the thumbnails are animated, which is a little disturbing.) You’ll also get pointers to places you can buy episodes (iTunes, UnBox, etc.) and places to get more information about the show. Blinkx only played previews of the videos I wanted to look at — to see the full versions it looks like you have to go to the originating sites (I saw video from YouTube, Google Video, IFILM, etc.)

Now obviously not everything that was found was a full episode (according to Blinkx there are over 200,000 videos related to Space Ghost.) I saw preview clips, commercials, favorite clips, even a music video from Pavement. Occasionally I saw the same clip listed several times.

Blinkx doesn’t list all or even most of the TV shows ever aired in the US, but you can do keyword searches. I did a search for Sesame Street. I found some clips, some news stories, one purported mashup that took me to a definitely-not-safe-for-work-I-gotta-go-boil-my-eyeballs video site, and even some live character appearances. Sesame Street is not on the Blinkx Remote show list however and there were not pointers to more information about the show.

I haven’t used Blinkx in quite a while — it’s really come a long way. I would start with the show list and browse if I were trying to find a specific show, and then do some general keyword searching. And look carefully at the source of a video before going to that site.

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