Comment by wayne-li2
7 months ago
Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”.
That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
> There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job
That is not at all what the article is doing. The article is saying the person is doing a very good job doing bad things.
I'm not generally for singling out a person and slinging mud at them, but, I also feel like unless there's a real social cost to acting the way these parasitic executives act, there's little incentive for them to change their behavior. There should be a sense of shame in ruining a once good product for career benefits and short term growth. I think the tone is appropriate in that it conveys that this is not a good-faith effort gone wrong, but rather an executive acting in a cynical and reprehensible way.
I disagree. ratfuck is a specific term, not just a general pejorative. and I think class traitor is appropriate here as well. but i get what you're saying. that's the result, pro and con, of the shift away from edited journalism to stuff like ed's newsletter.
I had to look this up — I've never heard it used in Britain.
> Ratfucking is an American slang term for behind the scenes (covert) political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
Interesting. In the (US) military, we used this term to describe someone who breaks into the MRE stash and steals all the good stuff, leaving horrid creations like cheese and veggie omelette.
“Private Johnson got caught ratfucking the MREs while everyone was doing PT” etc etc
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Whoa, I had no idea it was an actual term that’s applicable here. I thought the author was just creatively insulting the guy.
TIL ratfucker actually means something relevant to the context of the article.
I think you worded my feelings much better than I did. This is a fiery op-ed from a personal blog and not polished journalism, so I should expect some individualism on writing tone.
indeed. “ratfucker sam” is someone employed by billionaire Logan Roy in the hbo show succession:
> Tom (to Greg): “You're asking about the moral character of a guy named Rat-Fucker Sam? He's a fucking piece of fucking shit!”
He’s a suit with a laptop sitting in Logan’s private jet.
Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post.
I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.
Calling someone a name is only an ad hominem fallacy if you try to use it as an argument. Here it's just used for style. Since the author has plenty of valid arguments, the name calling - which is not an argument - can be dismissed without weakening the actual argument.
In any case, it is not sound reasoning to reject the entirety of an argument just because one of the subclaims is not a valid argument. Doing so is the fallacy fallacy.
In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Convincing or not convincing such an audience might not be a concern to an author focused on truth, since such an audience is persuaded by fallacies.
Another thing is that if a person is actually a bad person, calling them bad names describing how they are a bad person is actually a true statement and not an argument "to the man". In this case the actual claim that is being argued is the fact of the person's moral insufficiency. Calling them the bad name is just the conclusion of an argument.
The main snafu of calling someone names as a stylistic or concluding aspect of an argument is that it lacks the decorum. If the debate forum requires respectful decorum then an argument can be disqualified on these grounds.
However in this case the forum is the author's own blog. The author has clearly chosen to speak to an audience that can evaluate arguments without being set back by insults - presumably an audience who is already very upset at Google and wants to know which person they should be upset at specifically. In this role, I found the insults were actually rather enjoyable and funny!
this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.
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> In this case, it's true that name calling weakens the credibility of the post for a general audience. But I contend that we might not need need to care. It only weakens the credibility of the post for members of the audience who make the fallacy fallacy, and refuse to evaluate the other claims on their own merits.
Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
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I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition.
I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?
I've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue.
I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google (<1% of searches).
When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that it almost never gives me a better result than duck duck go did. Often when doctor go fails I don't bother with Google at all.
Even GPT4 driven Bing queries will give better results than Google now - mainly because GPT4 can filter spam, and has gotten a lot better about hallucinations.
I absolutely love to see it.
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I like Kagi. It's not great for images or videos at this stage, but it is good for general search because you can personalize the rankings of the results. And they are introducing improvements all the time.
Kagi is great. I switched my browser to it a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Used google once in that time I think.
I use Perplexity (mainly a legacy of wanting access to Claude when it wasn't officially available in my country, but Perplexity offered it & was available here). Search definitely wasn't my use case, but I accidentally discovered Perplexity is a much better search engine than Google or Bing in many cases (and I don't mean that in the sense that people who don't know how anything works will attempt to use ChatGPT as a search engine). Perplexity is actually really good at this & consistently brings me useful results when 2024-vintage Google can't.
I've used DDG and wanted to like it. I used another paid one and it wasn't great (forgot name). I've been on Kagi for the last 6 months and love it.
Duck Duck Go is for example terrible for me when it comes to looking up things in my native language.
Bing is.. fine I think nowadays
Yandex is great although it's degrading daily from AI spam (linked-in being the worst culprit).
Google is still really good with image search (while duck duck go is awful at it), I guess the ads team don't really care about image search that much to try to min-max it to death.
Using a pejorative is not an "ad hominem".
Good point. Replacing with pejorative would likely have been better wording potentially to get my point across but simply having held a role in the past as a person does not automatically associate you with all the sins of anyone ever in that role, so I see it as a personal attack unrelated to the point of the article.
Yeah, the pejoratives were not the argument. They were clearly put there to make the reading /freaking hilarious/ for anyone on board with "Google Bad".
But I wonder if there was a deeper strategy: were the attacks put there so that Google gatekeepers would ignore the article's insights?
It could have a similar effect to Cory Doctor's concept of enshittification. I don't know if it's intentional, but the vulgarity of the term seems to prevent committed enshittifiers from reflecting critically about enshittification and how to stop in time to avoid a collapse. After feeling the insult, enshittware supporters seem to conclude enshittification is a non-existent category.
It would be fun to learn these are intentional choices, designed to sabotage the criticized party on an epistemological level!
Considering what these guys have done to google search, I think this is the absolute minimum set of words they deserve.
This is going to sound crazy, but do you know what the web really needs right now in 2024? A new, searchable directory. Like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans.
Reddit is usually very bad, because it's heavily astroturfed and trivially easy for marketing firms to game. Something else is required.
GNU has a really concept called the GNS for Gnu Naming System. And what it was was that each human or org would have their own tld directory, and we could navigate the web through other actors, and they could pass trust for zones on to others. So, for example, I could resolve the same page as somepage.ninjaa.site or someotherpage.adept.site. This way you could create a trusted internet by just trusting the published link tld directory of people & institutions you know.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet
With so much AI generated spam being pushed on the web I think this is where we are headed towards in a couple of months/years.
Oh and not to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
The awesome-X lists seem like a community attempt to do something similar.
refdesk.com was the very first website I visited in the earlish-90s. An awesome curated collection of websites.
...and looking at it today, it may not have changed much.
Thank fark for Fark.com and I guess refdesk.com. Classic Intertubes.
reddit has become nearly unreadable. If it isn't puns, bots, bots reposting puns, it's some awful "no shit" relationship advice thread, etc. (no, I don't have an account so yes, I do look at /r/all).
That sounds somewhat like Kagi, no?
LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.
Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate. Get information from searches by using llms to filter through the crap results. Get information from scientific papers on Google scholar and the arxiv. Get information from textbooks on the library Genesis. Get information from audiobooks on the audiobook Bay. Get information from peers trained in specific domains. Get information by reading code and documentation belonging to open source projects. Get information by performing experiments and trials. Get information by compiling reports and essays.
There are still many sources for information. And it's okay to work hard for it.
Good luck and Happy knowledge work.
> Get information from llms after learning how to prompt them so that they won't hallucinate.
That is structurally impossible, because LLMs have no mechanism of knowing which answer is right or wrong. Please provide information how this prompting is supposed to look like.
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I think the tone is warranted given the scale of the problem. I don't think we should mollify complaints about products that literal billions of people depend on just because they're not nice.
About that...
https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr...
Just saw this article on my news feed.
Nah as someone who spent years getting beaten by wordpress admins with barely enough neural complexity to be called vertebrates in search results I'm going to concur with the author-- Prabhakar Raghavan has been waging a war against humanity's greatest communication medium and worse -- he's winning. He deserves all this contempt and more.
He's at least earned the equivalent of the Ajit Pai FCC chair treatment but because John Oliver and his audience can't understand this sorta complexity without a massive concurrent media literacy push it will never happen.
I have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is all sponsored links and the same ones page after page. It is so sad to see and the worse part is that I am not seeing any alternative. Bing is equally bad, DDG only marginally better. I hope there comes an alternative soon but I also realize coming into this space is certainly not easy.
Kagi is that alternative I suppose, at least for those who use search enough to pay for it. HN has a lot of testimonials on how good Kagi is.
Until Kagi becomes popular. Then the same "SEO" bullshit that plagues Google will bite Kagi too. Right now Kagi is too small to make it worthwhile to spend resources "optimizing" for it.
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The alternative is using tool enabled LLMs. GPT4 can drive Bing and filter results better than I can, and it hallucinates less than I do when pile driving through spam.
If you haven't read up on modern prompting strategies and still feel LLMs are stochastic parrots, you should read the foundational prompting papers (chain of thought, react, reflexion, toolformer, etc) and update your views about llms. They're very close to being the kind of autonomous search agents that the characters in classic cyberpunk novels would unleash on the real world to compile results.
It's actually made me excited about information retrieval again, for the first time in a decade. And the cool part is that autonomous search agents might become free and open source before the corporations manage to enshittify the experience.
Very fun times ahead!
Sometimes the tone is warranted. Destroying internet search for profit warrants scorn of all kinds. Zitron was too kind
> That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
I just want to point out that there are other search engines out there. I use search.brave.com and like it far better than google.
I am dreading the day when reddit becomes full of hot posts. I don't know what filter will I use then. I guess HN? But even I don't think we'll be safe from the GPTs here either.
Totally agree. His post loses credibility when he turns it into a class war instead of just focusing on why search quality was destroyed.
Still, I haven’t read this account from anywhere else. Everyone else missed the story.
I append GitHub:) and then I switch back to chatgpt
Yeah, the same for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for every query and it's often too US specific.
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