Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Geeks of the world, please help Dilbert!

I just spent five minutes at the Dilbert cartoon site being frustrated by my utter inability to find a comic strip from a few years ago that I'd like to hang on my wall. It's the sequence where the new product is a box of twigs and nuts, which is integrated with the customer's network by running a CAT-5 cable through the box.

There's no text search function on Dilbert.com. No way that I can type in the relevant keywords and find the panels. Google and Bing are mute to the right answer. This is a tragedy. Given that approximately 100% of Dilbert's target audience is search-savvy, 10% of Dilbert's audience could configure a nice SOLR implementation between dinner and breakfast, and at least 1% of Dilbert's target audience could implement a crawler/scraper/parser combo to pull ASCII text out of the GIF panel archive, this is highly sub-optimal.

Geeks of the world, please help Dilbert!