Russell Dicker

Amazon and Fark

This is clearly on of my favorite Fark headlines in a while:

U.S. to reposition satellite over Amazon. Seven out of 10 people found this information helpful

And just today Scott Ruthfield was chiding me for having not "grown out" of Fark.

Get a Cloogle

I may not fawn over them like so many media hacks, but one must admit that Google did revolutionize search with a very simple concept: relevance matters.

So what is going on now? I regularly run a search to see how their rankings are changing over time and qualitatively evaluate how they're doing. My control term is naturally, my name, "Russell Dicker", leaving out the quotes.

Over time I've seen my Amazon.com profile and my 43 Things Places People profile trade places along with a number of other things that made some level of sense. The current results however cannot be described as anything but rank stupidity.

Let's dissect their search results:

First up is a blog post about using the word 'whore' and its derivations in Amazon.com reviews.¹ In the comments, an angry customer posts an off-topic and woefully inaccurate depiction of a time I tried to personally help him. The combination means the first thing popping up on Google when searching for my name is "The Whore of Amazon.com". Charming.

Amusing but unflattering allusions to a secondary source of income aside, does this site really deserve to be number on for that search term? My first name appears five times, my surname eight, and five times they appear in succession. Not bad, but it never appears in any sort of markup and the page hasn't been updated in over a year. What about links? According to Google there are 0 links to that page.

Anyone can make a mistake, so what is second? Up next is an article from 1999 that embarrassingly tried to claim my father and I as the first .com dynasty.

While I blissfully remember the halcyon days of my fleeting membership in the .com paper millionaire club, this doesn't seem to be the most relevant item about me either. It has my first name five times, my last name seven, but only together once. Again there is no markup around the usage. This time the page manages to pull in a single measly link, but there haven't been any updates in nearly seven years.

The next few listings are the to-be-expected profiles on Amazon.com and 43 things. We also have the unexpected link to my single experimental entry on Erik Benson's Morale-O-Meter.

So where is this fine piece of writing with 10 instances of my first name, twice with my surname in markup, countless links to other pages with my name, two inbound links, and regular updates?

It is three quarters of the way down the third page, behind a gaggle of links where my names never appear together and, my personal favorite, a hit on an incorrect spelling of my name halfway down page two:

Far be it from me to predict Google's demise based on this one search result. After all, search is legitimately a hard problem. But I do wonder what my friends over in Redmond have as a top search result for me?

[1] The same site also contains another hit for my name which requests that I stop Googling myself. I honestly never went to that site before the page was up. The gentleman only assumed it was me doing the Googling for the name Russell Dicker. Hey Angelina Jolie, stop Googling for pictures of yourself naked!

What are you hiding?

Decisions that are prima facie anti-customer are always a source of curiosity for me. I also enjoy getting wrapped up in minutiae. What could be less customer focused than making your product intentionally harder to use? I'm referring, of course, to the "Hidden Track".

The practice of attempting to secret away a portion of an album from fans, usually by including a large amount of dead air before the concealed material, has been going on in the recording world for at least 39 years. The Beetles are generally credited with starting this phenomena by adding some random noise and voices in the run-off of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In recent years everyone from Atmosphere (Seven's Travels) to M83 (Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts) to Everclear (So Much for the Afterglow) has been playing along. The meme that ranks behind only Maxwell's Silver Hammer as JohnPaulRingoGeorge's greatest crime against pop music has been gaining traction. And it has got to stop.

Hidden tracks interfere with enjoyment of music

Hidden tracks are the scourge of iTunes playlists and dorm room make-out sessions everywhere. You can't put any unvetted playlist on random without the threat of five minutes of dead air rearing its ugly head.

You're not fooling anyone

Whereas tracks could be reasonably hidden on a record, the superior level of data provided by iTunes or even old-fashioned CD players makes this impossible. Every time I see a final track check-in at 9:50, I taste bile. What may have been quirky and surprising in the age of vinyl is infuriating today.

Wikipedia, as usual, has a nice entry on the practice, but it fails to seriously address the questions of "Why?" All it can muster is:

Most artists decide to include a hidden track simply to surprise their fans.

The only thing that surprises me about hidden tracks is that something so stupid has so much momentum. Maybe it shouldn't.

European Indicators

I do not like red turn signals on cars. Red is for break lights; flashing red is for fire trucks. In my mind, this is the order of the world. I find it strange that auto manufacturers haven't settled on yellow as a standard color for indicators. Yellow is the obvious choice because it denotes caution and awareness, but not emergency or danger. Yellow also disambiguates a driver intent on changing lanes from one tapping their breaks.

BMW had long been an ally in this righteous battle, so I was gravely disappointed when I saw the E90 3-series has red indicators. Although I could be considered a Chris Bangle apologist (love the 5, hated the 7), I couldn't help but wonder if the controversial American designer had sold me up the river.

Not so! Apparently it wasn't Mr. Bangle, but the collective tastes of my own countryfolk. In my recent trip to Spain I noticed something different about the E90s on the European roadways: they have yellow indicators...

What leads me to believe that red turn signals are an American peculiarity is Audi, a company that regularly flip-flops, was unanimous in its selection of yellow in cars across the Atlantic.

This leaves only one question, why?