I hear that there is a new search engine with my name on it: Cranky. Actually, although I might be attitudinally suited, it’s really aimed at people age 50+ and I’m younger than that. It’s the brainchild of Jeff Taylor, who left his previous big hit–Monster.com–to create Eons for the boomer generation and now this search engine. The home page for cranky.com actually talks about “cranking up an engine” as the inspiration for the name but I think cantankerous connotations couldn’t have been far behind.

Cranky is based on the premise that serving up search results based on what other people of a similar age wanted to see is useful. I question this premise. How much of anyone’s curiosity is based on age? Yes, before the age of 10, it is, but after that, I think other factors overtake age. Since Cranky likes to point out the virtues of living to be 100 years old, how similar are people from ages 50 to 100? It strikes me that such a broad demographic is a marketing ploy, not really a community of interest.

By the way, when I used the Cranky search yesterday, it listed the most popular search topic as Sex. I think that proves my point. Is that so different than the results for 30 and 40 year olds?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under baby boomers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.