New Google trick: Google consumerism (aka the Google “Sucks Index”)
: I have a bad host, Featureprice. I got it through an ad on Google.
Stupid me. I should have used Google to check them out.
Searching on “Featureprice sucks” brings up all kinds of results from disgruntled customers who posted their complaints on web pages far and wide (and even a site about nothing but terrible Web hosts). If only I’d made the “Featureprice sucks” search, I would have been warned off.
And so I realize that this is a new and terribly efficient way to protect consumers: Just type in any BRAND SUCKS and search you will learn a lot.
“Sony sucks” gets some complaints.
“Panasonic sucks” gets more.
“Sears sucks” gets tons of angry posts packed with bile (and for good reason; I hate Sears after an unbroken string of horrid experiences; I have ruled that we shall never buy from Sears ever again).
“Citibank sucks” brings up Nick Denton’s many complaints about the bank on all his sites.
Be careful: Don’t just count the results and take that as a numerical scale of suckiness. I searched on “Hostingmatters sucks” and got results about people finding that other services (e.g. Blogger) suck and thus they were switching to Hostingmatters (Glenn Reynolds’ host, by the way). The results can be both positive and negative.
So there is no neat mathematic formula that lets you translate BRAND SUCKS into an automated web-consumer-acceptance score.
But it’s not hard to look at the Google abstracts and get the context in a screen or two.
So this yields two…
RULES OF GOOGLE CONSUMERISM:
1. If you hate a brand, put in on your web page in the phrase “BrandX sucks.”
2. Before you buy from a major brand, search on the phrase, “BrandX sucks.”
And we are empowered, we Googled consumers.
