This is pretty awesome. Put aside the silly tone of the previous post; this update is 100% true. David Pogue has responded by email to my post about his enigmatic nature. Because he complains about the lack of comments on this site¹, I assume Pogue meant for his views to be represented in public. He writes:

John, since you don’t permit comments (why?), I’ll have to answer your blog by email.

The problem is, you completely missed the point of my tip (or you’re deliberately ignoring it to make me look stupid).

The tip is this: Use Google INSTEAD of the sites’ internal Search boxes.

This is not something that’s obvious, as you can see by the 80 comments for that post. ” You are SO right… Not only is this tip both so obvious and so overlooked, but it works like a charm,” says one.

I imagine that most people, when they want to search Amazon, NYTimes, Facebook, eBay, or whatever, go to that site FIRST and use ITS search box.

My point is that you can save time and get better results by NOT doing that.

In your post, you totally mischaracterized the point of my tip.

Dp

In two subsequent emails, which arrived before I could reply to the first one, Pogue sent along links to blogs that he says accurately captured the spirit of his tip (in contrast to GONY’s reckless tomfoolery, I gather). I pass those links on without comment:

• “om musing: The Mother of All Search Functions”
• “Eolake Stobblehouse Blog: Search Tip”

Pogue is absolutely right. I exaggerated the tenor of his tip, thus misrepresenting it, for the sake of a joke. I wasn’t trying to “make him look stupid,” per se, but the joke was at his expense, so he’s likely not interested in how I parse it. Fair enough!

Pogue says his Google tip isn’t obvious, but of course it is, and even his cut-and-pasted comment says so. I think Pogue’s real point is that just because a tip is obvious doesn’t mean it is intuitive. Indeed, it is an excellent tip, a simple search technique that’s often overlooked. Its excellence and funniness are not mutually exclusive.

For the record, although I did everything short of erecting a shrine to David Pogue in the previous post, let it be restated that I think Pogue is a top-tier technology writer, and have thought so for a good long time.

I don’t know if Pogue actually thought I misinterpreted the thrust of his tip or if he just didn’t like that I made a joke out of his uncanny ability to write for eggheads and rank novices with equal zeal. In any case, the record shall now stand corrected: The lead tech critic for the greatest news organization in the world did not post “to let us know that he’d found this site Google that can locate stuff on the Internet,” as I wrote.

As an olive branch, here is a more flattering photograph of Pogue than the one I used in the previous post.

I now await the inevitable email blast from Walt Mossberg, who probably didn’t like that hyperbaric chamber nonsense.²

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1. To answer Pogue’s question about why there are no comments on GONY, it’s because I am, at various times, too busy or too lazy to moderate comments, and I think moderation is essential to maintaining a quality site. (So does Pogue.) I very much enjoy and welcome the comments I receive by email, though, and I post the smartest ones, as I’ve done here. ↑

2. Note that Pogue didn’t jump to Walt’s defense! ↑