Search Me… or Mortgage Crisis, What Mortgage Crisis?
I have been hearing a lot lately about how we are facing a mortgage crisis of huge proportions. Lenders have overextended themselves with high risk, variable interest rate loans and now people are defaulting on loans in droves. There is a lot of talk about how the extent of this problem is so bad, markets could collapse. A crisis, n’est pas?
As a follower of the presidential campaigns, of course I wondered what the candidates were saying about this serious crisis facing America. So I went to all of their websites to search for what I needed to know. I found some information on Dennis Kucinich’s, John Edwards’, and a wee bit on Barack Obama’s sites. But I found something I did not expect to find.
No search!
One of the coolest things about the Web is it that you can search for ANY piece of information you desire and usually you can find it. Face it, Google and Yahoo don’t rule the web because they tell you what they think you should know. They give you what you want to know.
So you would think the candidate websites would provide a search tool so we can find out what the candidates say about the issues that concern us. That they would want to serve the needs of the voters they court.
Nope.
Well, to be fair, Edwards, Gravel, Kucinich, McCain, and Romney all have a built in search tool on their websites. None of the others do.
Don’t the others want us to be able to be able to learn about their policy positions? ABout the positions WE care about? Apparently not? They want to spoon feed us what they think we should know.
I wonder if they realize we could just use Google’s advance search tool and restrict our queries to a candidate’s specific domain and find the information we want? For example, I used Google to find information about Clinton’s position on the mortgage crisis. Perhaps they think that is what we all will do. But does everyone know how to do that? And even if we do, why should we have to go to another website to search a candidate’s website?
But still, I am hung on the perception issue. Sure, we can always use Google’s advanced search function. But how hard is it for the campaign to put that Google search tool on their own website? Or how about flipping the search function switch on in their Content Management System (CMS). It really is that easy to add search. Not to have it has to be a conscious decision by the campaign.
To me, if candidates are making it unnecessarily hard to find information on their websites, I feel like they are hiding something. Either that or they don’t really care about what voters need.
Voters need information about candidates to make informed voting decisions. That is the way our elections are supposed to work. In principal, at least, free markets (of goods or ideas) require perfect information. Websites without search do not provide perfect information. Its like burying a document in the middle of a warehouse of filing cabinets. Even if it is there, in effect it might as well not be.
Search tools can give us the access to information we need. There is no practical reason not to provide them. So why don’t all the candidates give us the information we need?
August 28th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Hey Alan!
Just have to say I saw this coming in 2002 when I purchased a book titled “the coming crash in the housing market.” I cant remember the author, however he made a solid argument as to how the predatory lending and lack of oversight and outright corrupt management at the pseudo govt agencies Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac could posibly tip the scale and send us spiraling into a market deflation. He also stated that the longer the interest rates were kept artificially low, the harder we would be hit. This was 2002 and he predited that things could get bad around 2005-2005. It is 2007 last I checked and the media just reported on how hard pressed Wall Street was regarding the most recent slide a few weeks ago.
My point ultimately is that the media was all over the story two weeks ago, but now you see hardly nothing on TV. The problem did not go away, yet they are attempting to keep folks from freaking out and causing a bigger problem.
Also, no one ever mentions Richard Nixon and the dissolution of the Bretton-Woods act of (I believe) the late 1940’s early 1950’s. This act fixed the world currencies to the value of the dollar and ensured that a 1929 crash would never happen again. However this prevented bankers from making big bucks, so in 1970 Tricky Dick dissolved the act (only the US had the authority to do this) and ended 2 decades of the highest standard of living in the history of the world. Within 2 years, much of the wealth in the US started to “float” to the richest 1% of the population and the rest is history.
We could find ourselves living with our parents and children in the next few years…