cRANKy

The recent press release from Eons says cRANKy is a: “New 50-plus boomer search engine emphasizes simplicity, relevance and peer reviews over volume.”

The next day I spotted a couple of blog postings that are not too complimentary about the idea of an age related search engine. For instance:

The language is a little condescending in my opinion, constantly referring to the different needs of the 50-plus market. Different needs? Give me a break. I don't like to "wade through millions of search results" either.

Then there is somebody who was annoyed at terms like “Age-relevant” and associating the word cranky with the 50-plus with the implication that anyone 50 or over is too far gone to be able to handle 'normal' search engines.

My take on the thing is a bit different.

First things first – the rationale for cRANKy is all about getting people onto the eons web site and getting them to come back. It is all about differentiating eons from the other 50-plus sites that are springing up like mushrooms.

The real question is does cRANKy deliver on its promise and if it doesn't could it have a negative effect on the user’s opinion of the company?

For it to work the consumer benefits equation must show that losing the mega search capacity of Google is more than off-set by a demonstrable improvement in the quality of the search results and the scoring by fellow cRANKy users.

The first of these benefits of cRANKy is very difficult if not impossible to prove.

Right now there are too few web sites with peer scoring to know if it is useful. Yesterday’s most popular search term on the site was “brain builders” and I could only find one review on any of the sites in the search list. Even the good old stable term of ‘sex’ only came up with one reviewer of the top listed sites.

The future will be about “interest related” searching – trust me. My bet is that cRANKy might have hit the market a bit too early to succeed. Secondly, the basic assumption that being 50-plus means that you share a common base of interests/opinions with your peers is (in my opinion) flawed. Time will tell who is right. Dick Stroud