whatever happened to moving forward?
I’m not a huge coffee drinker, but occasionally I need a good cup. Starbucks has its place, but sometimes you need *real* coffee. The kind you get at a place like Tarllucci e Vino.
The area around Bryant Park is totally lacking in java goodness. I’ve hunted and hunted. Once we found a place… Crestanello Cafe on 5th ave, but now it’s closed.
Having some faith in technology, I decided to turn to my friend, the Internets.
First stop, Yelp. Nothing useful. It works nice, but the user generated content is sorely lacking. Plus, it turned up results when something had the term “coffee table” which just isn’t useful.
Second stop, Citysearch. Once upon a time, it was useful. It was quick. It was the new yellow pages, with some great additional features. Then it got old and stale looking, so the owners decided to do a redesign. This was probably one of the worst executions of a redesign *ever*. It looks better, for sure. But now, it’s totally useless.
Sidebar: New York has so many extra layers of geographical taxonomy, that in order to find that needle in a haystack, you need to be very discriminating when it comes to neighborhood. The selection of neighborhood has to be better than the taxi map, which would have confused tourists believe that Manhattan is made up of six areas: up, down, left, right, Harlem and Wall Street. Citysearch once did a passable job of letting you pick from the ever growing list of neighborhoods, including those absurd real estate gimmicks (e.g. “west chelsea” or “east williamsburg”). Results were limited to those neighborhoods, and you could even see a map of the resulting locations.
I dare you. Try to search for “coffee” in “Murray Hill”. Unless you do things in a very specific way, it is useless. Next I tried something different: Midtown. Surely there is no place in the world other than the one Midtown I know of. Nope. At what point was my search at “newyork.citysearch.com” confused with “northcarolina.citysearch.com” or “tennessee.citysearch.com”?
There are so many truly wonderful web products out there that work so cleanly and elegantly, producing the results you hope to see. Why can’t a cash laden site like Citysearch get it right?
It’s probably run by a dinosaurl.