The web sucks.

At four this morning my daughter woke up sick, with an apparent fever. I had a Vicks V971 digital thermometer, but could not get temperature readings that made sense. In between tending to her, I searched online for operating instructions for the thermometer and could not find them, even on vicks.com. (Shame on Vicks. They advertise the thermometer on the site, but they won’t tell you how to use it. Do they really think I would go to vicks.com to make a buying decision on a thermometer? Please.)

One solution? Paid search with micropayments. Charge me a couple of cents for every search and don’t give me any advertising or paid links. Another? Don’t put money above all else. Make the first page of links for any search (except the search with the keyword “buy” in it) non-commercial. It won’t give you a $600 stock price but it might make search useful again.

We live in a small town and there is nowhere nearby to get a new thermometer at this hour. And I can’t leave my seven-year-old here either. I’ll go out in a few hours when the stores open. In the meantime, I’ll curse the lie that is search. The real digital divide is between what the web could be and the piece of crap it has become. That’s what happens when everything has to have a business model.