In one of the TV episodes of Max Headroom, one of the “live” characters (Max was computer generate went the premise of the show…) encountered a TV or screen or such in the advertising-heavy and influence-pushy world that had an illegal modification: an OFF switch.

While physical devices now might not have true OFF switches, as they are really always in standby, waiting for instruction by button (the microwave) or by infra-red (the TV, etc.) and never mind the spies of Alexa, Siri, Google, and who knows what all else. But that’s not the issue that is bugging me. The standby mode of most devices is not any real issue (except for the spies, of course) and the so-called “vampire” power drawer is actually quite minuscule.

What is annoying me is web, and site, search. Once upon a time you could put a dash in front of a search term to say “but not this.” Let’s say you wanted to find radio transmitters, but not Bluetooth. You could enter your search like this:

radio transmitter -bluetooth

And then get results that were mainly involving radio transmitters of one sort or another, and generally NOT involving Bluetooth. This no longer works, as far as I can tell. The -switch is either ignored or taken as an included search term. Thus the search results are full of Bluetooth transmitters. Why? Well, the suspicion is that Advertisers didn’t like being so readily excludable, so they pressured to remove that useful thing. It might be a bit different, but in the end it pretty much always comes down to money.

This also shows up in store sites, where a good search regime would seem ideal: Let the customer find the thing he’s looking for. But it seems to be, “But if we show him all these other things, he might buy those too.” And, again, the -switch isn’t there. And even if you are up to your ears in Bluetooth transmitters, by gum, they’re going to try sell you more. Never mind that you have no need of them and what you are getting is annoyed rather than satisfied.

My suspicion is that, eventually, some upstart will realize this lost utility and put it back… and clobber their competitors. Or at least that’s one of my hopeful dreams.