I can't wait to get old
Being old must rock. You can say what you want and no-one notices, you can tell stories that go nowhere, you can even return a jar of onions and keep a straight face. Being ignored isn't a bad thing, old people really are the modern day French Resistance. They go under the radar and strike only when they can do the most damage, like election day.
It must be hard to grab a whole demographic in an ageless, unisex, uncensored medium like the Internet, especially when most marketing execs don't know the Internet from the hole in their souls. How do you target the elderly, some of whom go out of their way to avoid technology? My dad turns 50 in a few weeks and he got rid of his mobile phone because he thinks they are impersonal.
Enter cRANKy. cRANKy is a search engine targeted at people over 50, like those SHIT Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency ads that have a bunch of former celebrities talking about their bowel movements. The RANK in cRANKy is a play on how search engines rank their results, an irony that was most likely shat out in a marketing brainstorm and will be lost on anyone over 30. Shat is a great word, I need to use it more.
cRANKy seems to get the basics right. Nice big text, no bright, flashing advertising and only 4 results per page so the dears don't get confused. But how effective is it? Do I care? I probably don't. Anyway, I put cRANKy to the test. Posing as a senior citizen, I searched for the sort of things that I assume cRANKy would get used for.
It does a great job of filtering out porn, and sometimes it will even warn you that certain results may not be what you are really after. I think that cRANKy is a great idea, but very poorly executed. Give it a try and tell me what crazy crap it comes up with.
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I tried "dog food recipes" and it came up with food you can make for your pets. If I were an old person that's obviously not what I would be looking for.
"A bit soft in the pants department" got a link to a pair of running shoes on amazon.com. Not exactly the Viagra I was looking for.
"How do I turn the internet off" didn't tell me what to do, but gave me an article on people in Winnipeg who were fed up with crime and set their own cameras up to catch the dirty criminals, which would interest me anyway if I was an old person. One out of three isn't bad, I suppose.
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