I'm Cranky!

By John I. Todor, Ph.D., Author of Addicted Customers (www.Addictedcustomers.com)

I just left www.cranky.com. This is search engine designed to please aging Baby Boomers. As they put it, “surfing the Web exhausts—and even exasperates—older people.” The search engine is allegedly designed to process each request from the perspective of someone at least 50 years old. This is inherently a good idea. As we age our thought processes do change as to the question we have and the type of answers we seek. However, if the site is based on this premise, “It’s hard from them (those over 50) to understand all the results,” the have got it wrong.

Today’s baby boomers are healthier and mentally sharper than any previous generation. They are less interested in “things” and more interested in “experiences”. They are less interested in information and more interested in answers. The focus is different. If www.cranky.com helps overcome these shortcoming of existing search engines—terrific. But if the name is intended to imply people over 50 are mentally challenged and that makes them cranky—we’ll as a baby boomer that premise makes me cranky.

I commend the effort to launch the first “age-relevant” search engine but hope they lose the name and more importantly, lose the negative premise. It could be worth their effort. Baby boomers control more than two-thirds of the wealth in this country.

Comments

[Ron Shevlin]

Thanks for the heads up on that site.

Personally, I think the appeal will be more "affinity-based" than "relevance-based".

What I mean by that: I (perhaps too half-jokingly) sometimes refer to myself as the "cranky old guy".

So I view the "cranky" moniker at cranky.com as more of a tongue-in-cheek term of endearment than anything else. (go check out www.mrcranky.com to see "cranky" applied to movie reviews).

And, in fact, based on research I did while I was at Forrester Research, boomers DO tend to be more cynical, sarcastic, and yes, cranky than other generations.

Anyway -- thanks for this and the other good stuff you've posted.

-- Ron