For the most part, being able to search for information on pretty much any person, place or thing on the Internet is quite handy. Not that long ago, when I first acquainted myself with the Internet, I thought of it as an endless library that gets exponentially larger with each and every click. For various reasons, I love reading neighborhood news on sites that originate in places like Bakersfield, California or Macon, Georgia, places I’ll probably never visit, at least not in person. I enjoy reading about sublets all over the world, and looking at collections of old photographs under the stewardship of libraries in places as far flung as Prague and Uruguay. It is fun, I must admit, to sit at my desk with a cup of coffee and read the morning news from Australia.
When I do it in moderation, I do enjoy clicking my way around the world on the Internet. It’s when I’m actually looking for something that I run into trouble.
Food is a sore spot for me. At some point, many cafes and restaurants in Portland stopped including their street address in their newspaper ads, fliers and billboards. My knowledge about advertising may be outdated, but as I recall ad space is charged based on the dimension of the ad, not the word count. And the address-free ads I’ve seen aren’t lacking for open space. Maybe it’s just a medal of cool to skip the physical location – ‘bricks and mortar,’ as they say. Or maybe the marketing people with search engine expertise do it on purpose, to ‘drive traffic’ to their client’s Web site so that they can brag about the increase in visitors during their quarterly review. Or maybe the number of visitors to a site determines how much they can charge companies that advertise on their site. Or, this being Portland, maybe they’re just kind of sloppy. I don’t really know, and I don’t care: if a place I’d like to go to to spend my money doesn’t list its location, my money ends up in another company’s till. I am an unapologetic cash fascist.
The search engines themselves are often pretty spotty. One day I met a friend for lunch and discovered that the address for the restaurant listed at the top of the results page was off, way off, not by a couple of digits but by 10 blocks. At the restaurant I told the guy who poured us coffee about it. He said he’d e-mailed the search engine company at least 20 times and had yet to receive a response – or a corrected listing. The maps spit up by the search engines, I’ve learned, are hopeless. And when I finally decided to buy a new refrigerator, the most annoying part of the process was not getting the old one hauled away but horsing around with the Internet in my unsuccessful attempt to buy from a local business. I entered ‘refrigerator sales Portland OR’ and with that the search was off and running, pretty much everywhere except for Portland OR. Listing after listing directed me to businesses with six-digit addresses in towns like Canby, Molalla and Forest Grove. Portland’s a fairly large town, but apparently there’s not much going on in terms of appliances. Still, I called one of the listings just for fun, and found that it wasn’t an appliance store at all but an appliance brokerage of sorts, a place that collects information on ‘your preferences,’ which, of course, includes your e-mail address, and then refers you to a dealer accordingly. I went to Home Depot – to the store, the one with a parking lot out front and sparrows flying about the rafters – where I selected, paid for and scheduled the delivery of my new refrigerator, which included the removal of the old one, in under an hour.
But as fraught with sloppy trickery as the Internet can be, I must admit that I’m sometimes pleasantly surprised at how responsive it is. Last week, for example, I was going to meet a friend at a restaurant I’d been to before but the exact location of which I couldn’t recall. So I looked it up, and discovered that its address is not listed on the main page, or the contact link but on the restaurant’s blog. So, in the spirit of technology as a conversation, I wrote a comment: “Kindly list your STREET address on the front page of your Web site. I will read the menu when I get there.” And lo and behold, within 24 hours, they did just that. For those of you in Portland, I’ll spare you the name of the restaurant, but its address is 555 N.W. 12th Avenue.
When I do it in moderation, I do enjoy clicking my way around the world on the Internet. It’s when I’m actually looking for something that I run into trouble.
Food is a sore spot for me. At some point, many cafes and restaurants in Portland stopped including their street address in their newspaper ads, fliers and billboards. My knowledge about advertising may be outdated, but as I recall ad space is charged based on the dimension of the ad, not the word count. And the address-free ads I’ve seen aren’t lacking for open space. Maybe it’s just a medal of cool to skip the physical location – ‘bricks and mortar,’ as they say. Or maybe the marketing people with search engine expertise do it on purpose, to ‘drive traffic’ to their client’s Web site so that they can brag about the increase in visitors during their quarterly review. Or maybe the number of visitors to a site determines how much they can charge companies that advertise on their site. Or, this being Portland, maybe they’re just kind of sloppy. I don’t really know, and I don’t care: if a place I’d like to go to to spend my money doesn’t list its location, my money ends up in another company’s till. I am an unapologetic cash fascist.
The search engines themselves are often pretty spotty. One day I met a friend for lunch and discovered that the address for the restaurant listed at the top of the results page was off, way off, not by a couple of digits but by 10 blocks. At the restaurant I told the guy who poured us coffee about it. He said he’d e-mailed the search engine company at least 20 times and had yet to receive a response – or a corrected listing. The maps spit up by the search engines, I’ve learned, are hopeless. And when I finally decided to buy a new refrigerator, the most annoying part of the process was not getting the old one hauled away but horsing around with the Internet in my unsuccessful attempt to buy from a local business. I entered ‘refrigerator sales Portland OR’ and with that the search was off and running, pretty much everywhere except for Portland OR. Listing after listing directed me to businesses with six-digit addresses in towns like Canby, Molalla and Forest Grove. Portland’s a fairly large town, but apparently there’s not much going on in terms of appliances. Still, I called one of the listings just for fun, and found that it wasn’t an appliance store at all but an appliance brokerage of sorts, a place that collects information on ‘your preferences,’ which, of course, includes your e-mail address, and then refers you to a dealer accordingly. I went to Home Depot – to the store, the one with a parking lot out front and sparrows flying about the rafters – where I selected, paid for and scheduled the delivery of my new refrigerator, which included the removal of the old one, in under an hour.
But as fraught with sloppy trickery as the Internet can be, I must admit that I’m sometimes pleasantly surprised at how responsive it is. Last week, for example, I was going to meet a friend at a restaurant I’d been to before but the exact location of which I couldn’t recall. So I looked it up, and discovered that its address is not listed on the main page, or the contact link but on the restaurant’s blog. So, in the spirit of technology as a conversation, I wrote a comment: “Kindly list your STREET address on the front page of your Web site. I will read the menu when I get there.” And lo and behold, within 24 hours, they did just that. For those of you in Portland, I’ll spare you the name of the restaurant, but its address is 555 N.W. 12th Avenue.
