Is McCook safe?

This week, a social media friend of mine shared an interesting URL with me. It was a site called travelsafe-abroad.com, and it seemed to be created for tourists considering the safety of travel destinations around the globe. On the site were articles and ratings written about Ho Chi Minh City, Odessa, Istanbul, Bangkok, Aleppo, Bucharest, Lisbon, Juarez, Mumbai, Port-au-Prince, and McCook, Nebraska. Yes, we were in there too, but we weren’t the only Nebraska town on the site. There were a total of 17 Nebraska communities listed, including Lincoln and Omaha. Some were even smaller than ours, like Nebraska City, Gretna, and Wilbur. Sorry Bartley. Maybe next year.

“Travelsafe,” to my mind, is an established travel insurance broker, and I first assumed that the URL was associated with that company. I was surprised to find that there were no offers for that specific business, and only one ad for traveler’s insurance overall. Instead, the site looks like an advertising trap filled with search-engine-friendly terms and facts and figures pulled from other places on the internet.

A questionable literary reference grabbed my friend’s attention to the site, but I found the website interesting on a couple of other levels. First, I have a bad habit of mentally dissecting business models, and sites like these have always intrigued me. The site drives ad revenues with a marriage of search engine optimization and massive amounts of content, some of which may or may not be automatically generated. Is this a product of artificial intelligence or some other algorithm that generates content?

Chat GPT is getting all of the glory now, but I was approached by a Chicago outfit 20 years ago that was using algorithms to write short news articles. It wasn’t called artificial intelligence at the time, and perhaps technically, it wasn’t. I don’t know where they draw the line between algos and AI, but I find the evolution of that technology interesting.

I am also profoundly interested in how McCook appears to the outside world. The page about McCook was content-rich and encompassed information about McCook’s history, weather, tourist attractions, and even our tap water. The primary focus, however, was on the safety of travelers as the URL would suggest.

Amid the blurbs about The Norris House, Heritage Hills, and tornadoes, were sections titled “Pickpockets,” “Scams,” and “Terrorism Risks.” As a worldwide site ostensibly acting as a safety guide for tourists, pickpockets are a perfectly valid concern, but seeing the term associated with McCook was oddly amusing. By the way, we did ok on the pickpocket data point, as we did with “Mugging Risk,” (low) and “Scam Risk,” (also low). We also scored well on “Transport and Taxi Risk.” Visitors from London and Paris will be comforted to know that they won’t get roughed up on the Senior Center Handibus.

To the chagrin of a few local critics, we also scored well on “Tap Water Risk.” We have paid substantial amounts of money to ensure the safety of our water and I don’t think the persistent trash-talk does us any favors. In this instance, at least the people at this site thought we held up pretty well against Guadalajara. A compliment is a compliment. Let’s take it.

The section titled, “Safest Places to Visit in McCook,” is actually more regional than city-specific. The site addresses our disk golf course, but also our surrounding lakes and birding. The Red Willow County Birding Challenge is a fairly recent creation, which tells me that the site is either recently created or at least regularly updated. The site also dedicates a few extra words to the Prairie Chicken Dance Tours. At this point, I’m wondering if the creators of the site have a predilection toward bird watching, or if birding takes a prominent place in our region’s outward-facing web presence.

As a part of the crime-statistic review, the site includes a quote from Police Chief Joel Smith that was lifted from the McCook Gazette. In the excerpt, Smith says that the majority of our crimes are drug-related and that his officers “deal with the same people…over and over again.”

The inclusion of local news content gives the impression that a human hand may have been involved in the building of content for the site and that it might even have benefited from local input. Don’t be so sure. Another portion of the report advises visitors to use caution when driving and to scan the horizon for “wayward cows or bison” on the road. Even a soft-handed town guy like me wouldn’t use the term “cows,” and when’s the last time someone collided with a runaway bison? Collisions with whitetails are bad enough.

Ultimately, it’s nice to see our town listed on an internationally focused site, whether customized, automated, correct, or incorrect. It’s also pleasant to know that the relative safety of our town is duly recognized. It’s no Mogadishu, but it’s home.