A new search engine, Cranky.com, was launched earlier this week and plans to profit from age-specific ads by targeting the 50-year-old-plus baby boomer. The man behind the site is Jeff Taylor, known for founding the online employment site Monster.com. The name "cranky" was chosen by Taylor – it supposedly illustrates his mood whenever he gets lost searching the web.
Now CEO at Eons, Taylor hopes that the search engine"s design will simplify Web searching by only displaying results pertinent to someone at least 50 years of age. Compete, an online market research company, helped the site find advertisements by identifying and analyzing 5,000 of the most popular Web sites used by a group of 500,000 users aged 45 and up.
Cranky includes a user interface that limits the first page to the top four authoritative sites matching the search term. The sites are rated and reviewed by Eons members and the ratings in turn influence the top sites. The search engine can potentially improve as more users engage with rankings. Of course, any rating system is prone to abuse and Cranky.com will have quite a workout converting users from other search engines already out thre.