You can put data in…

I’ve read all of Christopher Buckley’s satires, and have almost uniformly enjoyed them. I only recently got caught up, reading the latest one, Boomsday, just before the holidays late last year. I enjoyed it, too.

However, there was one thing in there that really caused me to lose my suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t the idea of a platform based on euthenasia. It wasn’t presidential wannabes getting acid trip messages from the ghost of JFK. It wasn’t the idea of twenty- and thirty-somethings actually organizing a movement. It wasn’t a Southern Holy Roller and a Vatican Cardinal fighting off Mafiya pimps. Nope, it was the premise that some company could write “Spider Repellent”, software that would remove specific search terms from Internet search results–I know enough about how search engines work to just flat out scoff at this. Ask Bank Julius Baer & Co. or the Scientologists, or whoever–once something gets on the Internet, it’s there for ever.

So, imagine my suprise when I read that there is a real as in “not made up”, not as in “I think they can do what they promise” service called Complaint Remover that claims to do just what Spider Repellent does in Buckley’s book.

Amusingly, I learned about this from an article wherein the service is pretty heartily pranked by Consumerist.