Searching For Grumps?

I just finished an article at Yahoo! News by Michael Liedtke of AP. The article describes a new search engine designed to appeal to aging baby boomers. Cranky.com processes search requests from the point of view of older users. Basically, the new search engine provides fewer results so that older users will not be overwhelmed with all the data. Google and other advanced search engines really provide way too much data for older people to see and process. There is an aggravation aspect to this factor, and older people tend to get frustrated with too much data.

Of course the press release and Cranky CEO Jeff Taylor would not put it this way out of political correctness, but the fact remains that many boomers are not nearly as adaptable to massive input from the internet as people who grew up with the technology. Taylor was the mastermind of Monster.com, and now runs Eons based in Boston. Taylor explains that people in the boomer generation find it difficult to process all the results newer engines provide. The target demographics for Cranky are people at least 50.  

Taylor’s introduction on the Eons site reads like Franklin Roosevelt’s: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” quotation. Taylor puts it this way: “Boom, Boom, Boom — Have you heard it? It’s the beat of our generation of Boomers and Seniors – many of us at Eons included – who want to live the biggest life possible. Collectively, we intend to do, see, learn, and be more on the way to the reachable goal of living to 100.”

According to the release, Cranky used the research firm Compete Inc. to find the 500,000 most popular web sites for the target demographic. Researchers at Compete reviewed and described the content of a focus cross section in order to find the most meaningful links.

The take!

Finally, a release I am overqualfied for! This new engine is functional and does produce only 4 results as the release noted, but I am not sure the majority of boomers are ready for “scratch and sniff” browsers yet! I know from professional experience in telecommunications that the elderly are often daunted by some of the new technology. Certainly some older people have problems seeing or reading type, and many get aggravated because their searches do not provide the desired results (don’t we all). There are a number of causes for these problems besides just being older.

Older people often have a little different logic system. One big problem that plagues the web is ugly advertising! Baby boomers grew up in a time when commercialization was much less prolific, and 8 out of ten searches being a sales pitch tends to mess up the hard wiring of us all. Asking a question and then getting what amounts to the wrong answer is not logical. Younger people are just more used to the junk! The vision aspect addressed by this release is a valid one, and that should be addressed by modern search technology, say for instance a zoom-able plug in!

“We have nothing to be ignorant of but ignorance itself!” 500,000 people does not a generation make, let alone a focus group beneath that study. I think that half a million people does represent a good demographic for investment in a catchy search engine targeting the same group the home shopping network preys on. Sure older people have some generalized difficulty coping with the web, but then I have seen 20 year olds pulling their hair out becuase they couldn’t eject a DVD drive! Older people just don’t like computers as much, and are not as familiar with them. We should spend more time showing people over 50 what they can get fom the web, not how we can baby feed them bits of it!

In conclusion, the Eons site is very nice, and it is easy to tell a great deal of resource was put into developing it. There are some fantastic things there for people of this generation to benefit from, but providing a search engine that lowers the expectations and abilities of older people does not make me think about living to be 100! I mean maybe we just need some bigger glasses or a larger LCD’s! As a very late note on these developments, when I went to Yahoo! mail at 11:50 Central time, there was a huge advertisement about Eons inside my mail! Then, just when I thought I was done for the day, a TV commercial on the Biography Channel came on with Taylor hyping Eons and Cranky! The guy seems to be pushing pretty hard to capture us boomers, and for some reason massive pushes with ”too” perfect timing make me nervous. Maybe I am just imagining things or getting old.