Comment by dang
7 months ago
Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself.
"The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"
Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it. This is just bog-standard HN moderation regarding titles. I skimmed the article looking for a representative phrase and couldn't find one on first pass. That is rather unusual and when it happens I sometimes ask the community for help.
Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.
That's what the article is arguing though. That a certain individual is 'killing' (not killed yet) Google Search. A different title would be misleading.
Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.
The article is not arguing that the killing is still on going, but that google has already been killed.
"Google" in the title should be read as "culture" or "the heart and soul of Google", not "Google the company".
Possible better title: "The man who destroyed the soul of Google Search"
> I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it.
If you haven't read it, why are you in a position to suggest whether the title is accurate to the article's contents or not?
I didn't read it, I skimmed it. In this context, "read" means "read it enough to form my own view of the story"; "skim" means "read it enough for moderation purposes", such as title editing.
Moderation relies on the fact that those two are not the same. It is impossible to read all the articles; it is possible to skim enough of them to make moderation feasible.
(I did end up reading the OP out of curiosity later. My own view of the story is that I am pretty persuaded by it, but I don't like the personal attack aspect, which shows up as a mob dynamic in the comments here.)
This implies that posting a multi-paragraph comment on an article without bothering to read it, as dang did here, is the standard that HN should aspire to going forward.
I didn't post about the article. I posted about how to moderate the title on HN, which is my job, and which does not require reading every article*, though it does require skimming some of them.
* Moderation would be impossible if it did.
"Linkbait" implies it's hyperbole, but I would argue that the headline is a perfect description of the argument being made here.
Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to do that.
In this case "The man who" is a linkbait trope and "killed" is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into "the man who killed" is linkbait.
The headline makes a promise and the article delivers on it.
At this stage, I think your reading is idiosyncratic and not an actual problem with the headline in relation to the article.
Editorialising it with a question mark that is not present in the article - which makes its case - is particularly inappropriate, as it makes it look like the article is asking a Betteridge question for a headline. This is you misrepresenting the article.
"Prabhakar made search bad"
"Prabhakar Raghavan is killing Google"
"Google's Death from Within: Prabhakar Raghavan"
"Blame Prabhakar Raghavan for Google's Crappy Search"
"Google Sucks. Because of Prabhakar Raghavan"
"Prabhakar Raghavan is the man killing Google Search."
"Yahoo Search Killer Prabhakar Raghavan Turns Death Ray on Google"
"Prabhakar Raghavan and the no good very bad Google search."
The number of times his name is repetitively mentioned in the article makes me read it in the voice of Stewart Lee.
"Prabhakar Raghavan is a bad man" :)
He accidentally hit me with his sock in a Google gym back when he was VP of Apps. Very bad man indeed.
about time to program websites to serve JWZ balls when HN tries these tricks to confuse its users IMHO
"Google ad revenue stalled, so they made SERPs worse on purpose"
those who can, write. those who cannot, change the meaning of titles.
I agree - and flagged it as a result. It is clearly a hit piece and has promptly even made it to Prabhakar's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan