CAR magazine launched its revamped website this week, and very smart it is too. Among the exciting new features is a panel which shows, in a slightly arty way, the most popular searches made by visitors to the site. Now clearly this is a new thing so someone at CAR had set the ball rolling by filling the space with the names of some interesting, expensive cars, the kind that a marketing nobber might say were appealing to the dynamic, affluent, ABC1 audience he was looking for. Unfortunately, precisely because this is a new thing, it wouldn’t take too many actual searches to change the popularity listing…
Yeeees, Vanquishes, TTs, all the kind of premium cars an upscale magazine would look for to create the right impression for its websi… hang on a sec… Daihatsu Applause? Sao Penza? Toyota Picnic? Someone’s filling the popular searches board with rubbish cars from the 1980s and ’90s! Either that or CAR’s readers are distinctly less affluent and considerably more mental then anyone might have thought. Still, this sub-minicab nonsense will go away in a second…
… and oh dear God look what’s replaced it. Unless CAR online really does aim to be a valuable source of information about ‘TWATS’ and ‘bum gravy’. In which case, EMAP must be relieved to have got out while the going was good. Still, this is just a momentary glitch. Refresh the page and all will be well…
…although when I said ‘well’ what I actually meant was ‘worse’. In fact the popular searches feature seems to be spinning out of control. Of course, it’s always a possibility that CAR readers really do want less on Lamborghinis and a lot more excellent features about ‘Dame Thora Hird’, ‘anal leakage’ and ‘prostitutes in the Ipswich area’. In which case, I wouldn’t want to work on their road test desk.
Suffice to say, the CAR online ‘most searched’ section has now been removed.
