Dishwashers and SEO
A glory of 1970s tech
There’s something peaceful in replenishing the vital fluids of a dishwasher. The trio of alkaline powder, salt for the zeolite resin and rinse aid to let the water dry in sheets instead of drops, is one of the glories of 1970s technology. None of your 3-in-1 rubbish for me thank you very much.
And weirdly, dishwasher history, as I discovered when trying to research this piece, is also a great example of what happens in search when no-one in the world cares enough about something to look for it. A telescope to discern the cosmic background radiation of seo in all its impotent splendour.
Like Howie in Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, I find myself, whenever I replenish the salt, rinse aid or detergent of my ageing dishwasher, having the same thoughts and feelings over and over again:
Satisfaction that my loving repairs of hose, pump and spray arm are still holding up.
Pleasure that we use separate components, rather than an all-in-one tablet, because of how snugly the three fit together.
And a vicarious thrill at what an achievement it was for the engineers of the time. Perhaps a greater triumph than the condensing washer-dryer, and definitely a greater accomplishment than the vacuum cleaner, saw-mill inspired centrifugal separators notwithstanding.
Change the System
How bold, in the run-up to the 70s, to be in a lab with sarcely a computer in sight, and have the audacity to think “I am going to solve the problem of hard water leaving marks on the dishes by building in a miniature water softener which adapts the latest industrial zeolite resin technology to create something that can be reused thousands of times just by flushing it through with a bit of salty water. Then I’ll exploit the Marangoni effect to stop the water from bunching up into droplets, and spread out into sheets instead, so there is no spotting. And to top it off, I’ll demand that supermarkets start stocking three wholly new categories of consumable to feed my creation, and do it in a way that creates a new standard across manufacturers.” Wow.
Of course there have been tweaks to the basic design over the years — sensors to detect how dirty the water is, to shorten the program, concealed heating elements to prevent meltdown of the misplaced plastic spoon, better soundproofing and so on, but the original vision is undimmed. A mass-market luxury. A democratised domestic servant, fed with nothing more than formaldehyde, salt and surfactants.
Cheat the System
Yet if you try to find out more, it turns out hardly anyone on the internet is interested in the history of dishwashers, or their trifecta of chemicals, beyond the basics in Wikipedia and a few odds and ends about Josephine Cochrane. Hell, even the Marangoni effect gets better YouTube videos than dishwashers do.
What you find instead is a bunch of copies of existing dishwasher content, infected with language about some dishwasher repair firm by grey-hat SEO people, trying to persuade the great learning machine in the cloud their client is truly relevant to dishwasher searches, honest.
Pathetic really, and comparable to the way that, more recently, researchers have been able to fool neural networks that have been trained to recognise objects, into thinking that this is a King Penguin. (If androids do dream of electric sheep they may not look like sheep to us.)
No one benefits from this chicanery, least of all nerds like me who are forced to tap on the ’Next’ button at the bottom of the search results in their quest for information. I went so far into the search results to find something decent to read on the subject of dishwashers, that Google decided to test me to see if I was actually a human. (Though if you’ve read this far you’ll know that’s debatable.)
So please, if we are making content about something we don’t really care or know about, let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who does. Content development isn’t just about opportunity. It’s about empathy.
And we might need to try a little harder than the P&G lads in Cincinnati who, when writing up this 1970 patent of a method for tinting dishwasher powder without staining utensils wrote:
“A very useful color for this purpose is green, particularly because of the traditional association of green with chlorine bleach, chlorine gas being green colored. Moreover, housewives associate green in their minds with an ability to clean well.”