Just in time for Election Day Tuesday November 4, 2008, here is an extremely un-useful mapping service to help you find exactly where not to go on election day in order to cast your vote.
Click here to find where your polling place isn’t for this election
For example, here is precisely where I would not go to vote if I lived where I work which I don’t:
Ok, what’s the point of this you ask?
Well, first, there is little point — it’s mostly a joke.
Beyond that, it’s meant as a satirical commentary on the inability of computers to understand satirical commentary.
Search engine algorithms and search advertising algorithms can’t distinguish well between “polling place is” and “polling place is not”.
Enough googlebombing and I’d wager the above link could rise in the ranks for search queries like polling place.
Enough money and a griefer serious about policing the Internet’s un-seriousness could advertise the link to people searching for their polling place in battleground zip codes, keeping the ad text perfectly factual with a few well placed negations, bypassing human editors at least for a few crucial hours.
In a way, it’s a thought experiment into our future as robots replace humans in the workforce, in this case librarians and editors.
The site is not meant to fool people, even foolish people, only computers.