Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Times:
To the contrary, there will surely be a new secretary of state visiting you next year with the umpteenth road map for “confidence-building measures” between Israelis and Palestinians. He or she may even tell you that “this is the year of decision.” Be careful. We’ve been there before. If you Google “Year of decision in the Middle East,” you’ll get more than 100,000,000 links.
Can this really be true? Nope. In fact if you Google that phrase you get fewer than 12,000 links.
The problem here is that Thomas Friedman apparently doesn’t know that when you search Google for a phrase you need to put quotes around it. Without the quotes, you do indeed get more than 100,000,000 results. That’s because a lot of web pages mention years, decisions, and things located either in the middle or to the east.
It seems plausible that long-time New York Times columnists might not know how to use Google, but it’s appalling if the people who edit and fact-check the columns don’t know how to use Google.
So that this post has some content and is not pure snark, here’s a relevant article by my friend Eszter Hargittai, whose research has taught us a lot about how people use search engines in the real world.
Quomodocumque 