Laura has just gotten a new job with one of the local hospitals as a File Clerk in their Physical Therapy outpatient center. She’s lookin forward to getting started, and I’m looking forward to becoming a 2-income family! :)

But they require her to wear scrubs. Since we’re going to Meridian anyway this weekend, and I get today off, she asked me to call one of the hospital’s pharmacies and see if they sell the kind of scrubs she wants. Well, I obviously don’t have a Meridian phonebook on hand, so how am I supposed to get the number to a hospital in Meridian to call and ask?

Well, my initial guess was to just hit Google. So I went and googled “anderson pharmacy meridian ms”, and awaited the results. I figured I would wind up digging through at least a page of newspaper articles and ads before I managed to scavenge out a phone number. Imagine my surprise to see the first link at the top of the page show the exact place, complete with an address and phone number. Clicking on it brought me to Google Local where they add to this a Map to the store (courtesy of Google Maps), a list of payment options, brands carried, and store specialties! Click the View Larger Map link to be wisked to a full-size map with Satellite imagery where you can get driving directions, and even a link to the specific location’s owning/operating company! (In this case, Scooba Pharmacy)

Just on a whim, I thought “Well.. I dont’ really need a pharmacy, I just need scrubs. I wonder..” and then googled “scrubs meridian ms”, and once again was amazed as it listed places known to sell “scrubs” in or near Meridian MS, including a place I had never heard of called Hice Scrubs, which doesn’t even have a web presence as far as I can tell. Again, complete with a phone number and driving directions.

Google’s philosophy has always been “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (along with the lesser spoken “Do no evil”). Seems they’re getting there by linking to other databases: Yellow Pages, maps, roads, even mining out information on brands. Almost scary in a way.

If you found this neat, read the other power of google stories.

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