The return of the Master of the Obvious

Posted at: Monday, June 1, 2009, 2:39 pm

The WSJ’s L. Gordon Crovitz plods on. Connoisseurs of his sober assertions of eminently incontrovertible fact will find much to savor today:

[Google] so dominates search on the Web that “google” has become a verb meaning “to look for information.”

…

[Search is] the first place we look for information on the Web, and the Web has become the first and often last place we look for answers.

These scintillating observations come not in a 10th-grade book report but an regular op-ed column in the WSJ. These tidbits come in the context of a column in which he tells us that Microsoft’s new “Bing” search engine had “the most buzz” of any product launch at the Journal’s All Things Digital conference. He was there and I wasn’t, but it’s hard to believe that was the case, unless it was the only product launch.

The prospect of Bing lets him ruminate on the nature of Google:

One of the most impressive achievements of Google is how well it’s done without much effective competition. About two-thirds of searches in the U.S. are now through Google, one-fifth through Yahoo and less than one in 10 through Microsoft.

Does that sentence make sense? There used to be a lot of competitors, but Google outsmarted them, right? Yahoo and AOL had huge user bases, but they lost much of them to a better product.

Crovitz is so wooly-headed that it’s hard to figure out what he’s trying to get at. If Google didn’t have “effective competition” its success wouldn’t be that impressive, right?

I think it’s more true to say, “The most impressive achievement of Google is how well it’s done in such a once-crowded field, even with very big operations (Yahoo, M’Soft, Amazon) always trying to steal its crown.”

Waxing profound, Crovitz continues:

After all, search has changed how we gather information and, when it works, find knowledge. It’s been a little more than a decade since people first began to go online to look for information rather than in print directories, encyclopedias and indexes. It’s impossible to overstate how reliant we have become on the Web and its search engines to find information.

As I’ve noted before (“The Master of the Obvious”), Crovitz’s column is a classic put-out-to-pasture consolation prize to a former editor, in this case a former publisher. One gets the feeling the Journal editors and copy editors view Crovitz’s fatuous submissions as a big ol’ waste of space, and courteously decline to make suggestions to improve it.


1 Comment so far

  1. Rev. Keith A. Gordon June 2nd, 2009 4:50 am

    The key to Google’s success is not the company’s competition, or lack thereof, but rather that it revolutionized searching the web in a way that nobody else had thought of doing at the time.

    Yahoo, in the beginning, was not a search engine, but rather a list of interesting websites that grew into a search function. AOL’s search was perfunctory at best. Google’s earliest competition came from folks like Dogpile (an early search aggregator) and Alta Vista.

    Google beat the competition by offering a leaner, more efficient product that produced results that the consumer wanted…and in a way that nobody else (certainly not Microsoft, who have never been able to do anything efficiently) has been able to match.

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