Larry Halverson: I've Been Thinking

Okay, here’s one for you.

Cranky.com

It’s basically a search engine. Like Google. But, it’s tailored for those of us who are too old or too Internet-inept or too . . . cranky? . . . to appreciate the power of today’s popular search engines. For instance, a Google search for “headache remedies” (a randomly chosen topic; I rarely need them) nets about 124,000 hits, displayed 10 per page. Use Cranky.com and you see four hits. Also, there’s one button to push if you want to narrow your search (they suggested “headache home remedies” for this search), another if you want to expand it (“migraine remedies” was suggested), and ten places to click at the bottom of the page if you want to see hits five through 15.

Unlike most places on the Web, the pages showing the search results are clean and uncluttered, another feature greatly appreciated by those of us dealing with age-related ADD. They do, however, include a few links to “sponsored sites” of companies wanting to sell stuff to our demographic segment.

If you have time on your hands (a topic for future discussion) and are 50+ in age (blatant age discrimination), you can register. This allows you to rate any sites you access using the Cranky search engine. It is these ratings by registered “members” that are used to rank the sites and determine which sites make it to the top of the list in any search. (This ranking aspect is portrayed in the site name – cRANKy.) The ranking process makes your search results more likely to meet your particular needs. That’s the theory, anyway.

I haven’t used it a lot yet, but it does seem to perform as promised, and it provides access to a lot of other content pertinent to retirement. I did stumble across one amusing tidbit in my test search for headache remedies. I learned that the Wisconsin Badgers basketball team isn’t the only aspect of Madison that is #2 in the nation. We’re also the nation’s #2 “migraine hotspot” according to a website called Mind Over Migraine.

Maybe that’s because too many of us are doing too many Google searches.

Later.