Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone Douglas 5276’ reads one line in the ad.
It’s not the first takeaway, or the first online food ordering joint, or the first food delivery service, all of which search engines easily found or even insisted I was actually looking for. It’s not just Google at fault here: no search engine found Kin-Chu when I queried them, even when using natural language questions. Unless you had the restaurant name, you’d draw a blank.
For the record, I don’t enjoy writing about Big Tech, but it seems every time I get near one of their sites, they are happy to remind me that they are liars, cheats or incompetents, and it feels only right that the wider community knows since most accept whatever propaganda are told to them.
I really didn’t have much of an issue with Google till 2009, when helping a friend retrieve his deleted Blogger blog, and discovering obfuscation; then I found that its Ads Preferences Manager was outright lying to the public, and had done for a long time.
I used Facebook for some time before encountering weird design decisions, bugs, database faults that kicked people off, tons of bots in 2014, then the big one: the forced downloads of “malware scanners” that could well have been malware itself. Instagram I happily used but the features kept getting stripped, while Twttr was dandy till they began kicking off legit accounts—eventually including Lucire’s that necessitated a legal threat before reinstatement. And the last week has just shown us how bad Amazon is.
It’s why I don’t use them though inevitably there’ll be something which pushes you into their orbit, since they are everywhere, and you wind up going through the same motions.
The fake articles about me continue to go up. Only about three or four people have been responsible enough to remove or modify their entries, with Shahid Jafar the quickest and kindest to act when he was alerted to the misinformation. He explained he was only going off what he read, and what was out there was already considerable. He’s since been an ally trying to get to the bottom of it, so hats off to Shahid.
A couple rightly used their knowledge of the real situation and wrote their posts—they might have still been gaming Google but at least they’re telling the truth. One was so intent to keeping their post up, they changed my name to Jack Yans. (Now I know how John Key often felt.) The rest are quite happy with misinformation, since they want the money Google throws at them.
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