The arrival of Cranky.com comes with features its founder, Jeff Taylor of Monster.com fame, thinks will be well received by the 50 and over crowd.
We are in a time when it seems that age-relevant and Internet equal someone between the ages of 13 and 25. Not everyone wants the blast of information that the younger set expects from its web experience.
Taylor has followed up his building of Monster and the creation of Eons for socially networking the baby boomers with a new site called Cranky.
Cranky is a search engine, and pulls its results from the index at Ask.com. Taylor and his Cranky followers felt they could do more than just present a list of links in a response to a query.
They added features derived from Eons to Cranky. The company calls this targeting a “lens” that combines search rankings with expert reviews and Eons user ratings to serve up what it thinks are the best results for the 50+ crowd.
Taylor described the philosophy of the Cranky approach in a statement about the search site:
It’s easy to type China trip’ in a popular search engine, but it can be overwhelming to navigate the 60 million results. We’ve discovered that, universally, the Eons Generation doesn’t like to wade through millions of search results. So, we created Cranky.com to engage this energetic group of Web explorers who embrace technology, including those who may not be as well-versed at Boolean searches and complex narrowing techniques as younger generations who grew up on the Web.
Getting to Cranky from Eons involved working with online market research firm Compete to determine what was popular with people over the age of 45. Once they had that data, they reviewed and rated the top 5,000 sites out of that group’s preferred places to visit.
When doing a search on Cranky, the first page displays only four results. These would be the results Cranky has rated as the top four most authoritative ones for the query. Each page of results after the first shows ten per page, closer to the norm for other search sites.
Another aspect of Cranky appears to be a nod to the strategy of giving people the most informative answer immediately. Called ‘Eons Answers’, these tips direct the Cranky searcher straight to the most relevant content available on the Eons.com site.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
