The next time you're desperately searching for an answer for a grueling scavenger hunt on campus or simply want to know where the LOVE statue is located, you might turn to the kgb for help.
The Knowledge Generation Bureau, or kgb for short, recently launched a mobile search service that claims it can answer any question- via text message.
For 50 cents, a text message to "kgbkgb" will yield a response from a live person - a kgb "special agent"-- with the answer to your question.
The service was rolled out this month via a series of odd commercials that left many scratching their heads.
"To be honest, the commercials didn't do a very good job of introducing and describing what kgb is and how it works," said Wharton sophomore Charles VanTassell.
"For all you know, it could be a new, more public version of [the] Soviet intelligence agency," he joked.
Started in 1992 under the name INFONXX, the New York-based directory-assistance company re-branded itself as "kgb" last year, spoofing the name of the feared secret intelligence agency of the former Soviet Union.
In addition to the mobile texting service, the kgb Web site features a free Wikipedia-like database that divides its 3 million pages into four "super topics": places, people, products and pleasures.
While the content is a combination of kgb original and user-generated information, some are still not impressed.
"Wikipedia is a brand name, and it's something that runs largely off donations," College sophomore Ben Epstein said. "The [kgb] database is just them trying to copy Wikipedia."
Regardless, with its new mobile service, the company is entering into a crowded market that has largely avoided charging users any money.
Both Google's free SMS service and Yahoo's Mobile Search return results to people's search queries via text message.
While the two mobile services are entirely automated, ChaCha, another free service, is human-based like kgb and operates in the same manner.
Any text from a customer is either answered by a live person or - more commonly - -responded to automatically from a database of already-answered questions.
Both primarily rely on people working from home while getting paid on a per-response basis.
According to the kgb Web site, anyone over 18 can become an answering guru - provided they can pass a 15-minute trivia quiz.
For students, the lure of extra spending money - and a cool job title - sounds appealing.
"It sounds like something I would do if I had 10 minutes to kill before I went somewhere," Wharton junior Zack Yang said.
