WRITTEN ON May 17th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information, Save Time and Money, What do we want?
Litter wardens in Crawley issued an £80 fine to a woman whose toddler dropped two Quavers on the street. Creepy Crawley Council revoked the fine and apologised. Nevertheless Councillor Beryl Mecrow admonished: “People have a responsibility not to drop litter.” It follows the episode of the woman fined for throwing a Wotsit in Luton last year.
These gems should not be lost to future generations of ethnographers. But what happens when we search the trusted gold-standard, soon to be one and only e-goverment web site for the central search terms?
Search: “Quaver”
Search: “Wotsit”
The £multi-million site appears to deny that either such episode ever occurred!
But, if given the existence of Google, you prefer to search on the twopenny-halfpenny alternative government search engine the entire pattern of council behaviour is laid bare. Thus we prove the “Wotsit principle” (set out more elegantly below by Dr Paul Hodgkin): independent sites reflect better what people are interested in. They don’t give a fig about what government thinks is important. Thus they win.
Although Luton Council’s website carries a cheery defence of their cheesy shocker, Crawley’s own site also pretends that nothing untoward to do with crisps (here) or with Quavers (here) and the Council has ever taken place, even though this must have been the year’s hottest news story in Crawley. It is kinda creepy, isn’t it?
Aconyms: 2. Cheesy/crass brand names: 3
4 Responses to “Search engines and the quavering wotsit of council powers”
ooh guv, your links seem to have quavers where they need wotsits! Sort it out!
Alan – I meant that the Trans-Gov policy is to close down 500-odd web sites and focus all on DirectGov. The reason we keep doing this same old search gag (apart from the fact it’s fun) is that I just dont understand for what purpose Direct Gov search is ever better than Directionless. Add to that the fact I really cant be doing with Directgov editorialising (see Cluetrain rewrite) and I just cant see the point of DirectGov. And that’s a lot of our money spent on it, before, during and after your time. I’m not trying to be difficult here – I just dont see what that money has bought us. I just want good e-services, navigable government data which others can reuse and good search. Am I a dimwit/being difficult or are the Emperor’s new clothes not all they’re made out to be?
80 pounds is a significant fee, too bad i feel sorry for her.
“soon to be one and only e-goverment web site for the central search terms” isn’t quite true. when i left directgov and i appreciate it may have changed since, directgov only searched its own site, it didn’t go anywhere else in government. that was a policy decision, one that i disagreed with but understood at least, to try and keep people inside the “walled garden” of joined up government. any links to outside sites are manually forced to the top of the ranking if they’re absolutely necessary. so it would be no surprise to find a complete absence of niche news stories on directgov’s search engine. as you rightly say, why search government’s entire estate if google does such a good job?