Someone from the UK just found this site by searching for “device to stop young people congregating” using a mobile phone provider’s search engine.
Now, I know, I know, there may be an important backstory behind that person’s search. Some people apparently really do have problems with kids intimidating them (e.g. see these comments on the Mosquito) and believe that a technological solution is the only answer.
But take the concept in isolation: how will history judge the “device to stop young people congregating” concept? Will it be seen as a cruel, archaic display of embdedded prejudice, in the same way that we would be horrified to see “device to stop X race of people congregating” or “device to stop X colour people congregating”?
Or will it be seen as a mild, thin end of a much larger, more sinister wedge (“device to stop ALL people congregating”)?
I’ve also taken to the “what the hell were they thinking” tack when looking at the search queries that led people to Meme Therapy. My favourite is “Jose the only and only”. Unfortunately I suspect they weren’t thinking of me.
[...] I don’t normally do ‘off-topic’ posts – in fact this is the first – but I just re-read the earlier post ‘Nice attitude‘ and clicked on the link ‘device to stop young people congregating‘ in the post, which links to an Orange search page which initially referred a visitor to this site. Notice anything? The same link, to the Orange search page you’re viewing, is top of the search results. That is, Orange’s search engine has listed one of its own results pages in its results. It’s as if Google had ‘Foo – Google Search’ as the top result when you searched for ‘Foo’. Presumably whoever designed Orange’s search engine (Overture?) never expected anyone to link directly to any search done using it, and so didn’t build in any method of trapping self-referencing hyperlinks? It’s a good job they don’t have an ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button or you’d just keep viewing exactly the same search page every time you clicked on it. [...]