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Cold-War Era Search Service?

By Brian | September 14, 2009 | Share on Facebook

There’s been a lot of political talk on my blog of late, and there’s sure to be more, so I thought I’d take a quick break and discuss something a little more frivolous – like Soviet intelligence agencies.

Seriously, who in their right minds decided to name a search service KGB? Were they assuming that they’d have absolutely zero customers over the age of 30? Makes me think the service is going to text me answers to questions before I even ask them…

And not only that, it’s entirely phone-based. I can’t even type a question into their website and get an answer on screen. I need to type in my 10-digit mobile telephone number and receive the answer on my phone. Even though they know I’m currently using a web browser. Really, folks? In an era where almost every phone can access Google almost as easily as a text message, and Google (especially with its excellent mobile version) can provide multiple responses (from multiple sources) to the same question at once? Why, this technology seems like something that was built when, well…when the original KGB was still around.

Congratulations, KGB! You’ve created an inferior product that inherently limits my interaction with it, and you expect to use it to compete with one of the largest and most successful technology companies in existence today. Oh, and you appear to be spending millions of dollars advertising it on television. How many TV ads do you see for Google? That’s right, none. You know why? Anyone who uses the web already knows about it.

Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame, KGB…

Topics: Tech Talk | 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Cold-War Era Search Service?”

  1. Ilya says at September 15th, 2009 at 1:54 pm :
    A very similar service has been heavily advertized on British TV for the last couple of years of my life there. I could never understand what exactly is the value here…

  2. Jeff Porten says at September 16th, 2009 at 10:00 pm :
    I’ve checked out a few services like this: the deal is, you send them a text message, and a real human being sends you back a text reply. Theoretically, you get better results than using Google SMS.

    What I don’t understand is that these guys charge $1 a message (which is why they don’t give web replies — no billing mechanism), and their competitors are free with advertising.

  3. Brian says at September 16th, 2009 at 10:21 pm :
    I think they’re required to charge by the Politburo…

  4. Jeff Porten says at September 18th, 2009 at 11:22 pm :
    Actually, we support universal text coverage, from each according to their Googlability, to each according to his intellectual needs. Comrade.

  5. Alendali says at October 10th, 2009 at 1:42 pm :
    Very cute :-)))),