16 ms·

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

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
overgard 2y ago
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.
taf2 2y ago
I append GitHub:) and then I switch back to chatgpt
chaostheory 2y ago
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.
godshatter 2y ago
> 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.
xenago 2y ago
Sometimes the tone is warranted. Destroying internet search for profit warrants scorn of all kinds. Zitron was too kind
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
scarfacedeb 2y ago
Yeah, the same for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for every query and it's often too US specific.
abtinf 2y ago
> 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.
__loam 2y ago
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.
sailfast 2y ago
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.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  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!
  - polyphaser 2y ago
    this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.
posix_monad 2y ago
LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  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.
  - WA 2y ago
    > 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.
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
      > This is structurally impossible False. The mechanisms include examples/in context learning (ICL), feedback and validation loops/tool using, backtracking/conversation trees/rejection sampling, editorial oversight/managerial correction, document assisted reasoning, and having well defined and well documented high level processes, workflows, and checklists. So basically the same things you need to do for managing other people while covering your own ass. You are still very much in the loop, and you never ever use output you don't approve and fact check. But you also give it the references and examples it needs to improve its accuracy, and give it feedback/iterate on problems until they're really solved. Modern LLMs like GPT4, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 no longer have the cascading hallucination problem. If there is a hallucination/mistake, you can backtrack with a better prompt and eliminate it, or just correct it in context. Then, unlike with GPT 3.5, there's a good chance it'll run with the correction without immediately making further mistakes. Work with it the way you would work with a junior subordinate who can do good work if you help them, but doesn't realize when they do bad work unless you help them a little more. Ensure that it doesn't matter if they make mistakes, because together you fix them, and they still help you work much faster than you could do it on your own.
devindotcom 2y ago
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.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
  - remarkEon 2y ago
    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
    - johncessna 2y ago
      I've always used it as a variant of chicken fucker
  - wayne-li2 2y ago
    Whoa, I had no idea it was an actual term that’s applicable here. I thought the author was just creatively insulting the guy.
- wayne-li2 2y ago
  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.
- eutropia 2y ago
deskr 2y ago
Considering what these guys have done to google search, I think this is the absolute minimum set of words they deserve.
deepakarora3 2y ago
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.
- distances 2y ago
  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.
  - 1024core 2y ago
    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.
    - noirbot 2y ago
      Perhaps, but isn't the value of Kagi that it's user-tunable? If you open a page and it's distasteful to you, you can remove it from future searches, and you can uprank the sites you find useful. Related, no idea if they actually do it, but presumably, Kagi is getting signal from that about what people find useful, and integrating that into their rankings. If I run into SEO crap on Google, I'm not sure they ever know I hated it and went elsewhere. They see that I searched and I clicked, and they got their money and don't care.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  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!
3abiton 2y ago
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.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
p3rls 2y ago
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.
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
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.
- nullindividual 2y ago
  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).
- atif089 2y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- ninjaa 2y ago
  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://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet
- ozr 2y ago
  The awesome-X lists seem like a community attempt to do something similar.
bimguy 2y ago
[flagged]
gorbachev 2y ago
About that... https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-products-and-game-google-with-parasite-seo/ https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr... Just saw this article on my news feed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

overgard 2y ago

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.

taf2 2y ago

I append GitHub:) and then I switch back to chatgpt

chaostheory 2y ago

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.

godshatter 2y ago

> 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.

xenago 2y ago

Sometimes the tone is warranted. Destroying internet search for profit warrants scorn of all kinds. Zitron was too kind

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

scarfacedeb 2y ago

Yeah, the same for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for every query and it's often too US specific.

abtinf 2y ago

> 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.

__loam 2y ago

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.

sailfast 2y ago

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.

barfbagginus 2y ago
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!
- polyphaser 2y ago
  this comment is a wonderful exercise in logic.

posix_monad 2y ago

LLMs and astro-turfing have ruined that approach. I honestly don't know where to get information from these days.

barfbagginus 2y ago
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.
- WA 2y ago
  > 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.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    > This is structurally impossible False. The mechanisms include examples/in context learning (ICL), feedback and validation loops/tool using, backtracking/conversation trees/rejection sampling, editorial oversight/managerial correction, document assisted reasoning, and having well defined and well documented high level processes, workflows, and checklists. So basically the same things you need to do for managing other people while covering your own ass. You are still very much in the loop, and you never ever use output you don't approve and fact check. But you also give it the references and examples it needs to improve its accuracy, and give it feedback/iterate on problems until they're really solved. Modern LLMs like GPT4, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 no longer have the cascading hallucination problem. If there is a hallucination/mistake, you can backtrack with a better prompt and eliminate it, or just correct it in context. Then, unlike with GPT 3.5, there's a good chance it'll run with the correction without immediately making further mistakes. Work with it the way you would work with a junior subordinate who can do good work if you help them, but doesn't realize when they do bad work unless you help them a little more. Ensure that it doesn't matter if they make mistakes, because together you fix them, and they still help you work much faster than you could do it on your own.

devindotcom 2y ago

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.

Symbiote 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking
- remarkEon 2y ago
  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
  - johncessna 2y ago
    I've always used it as a variant of chicken fucker
- wayne-li2 2y ago
  Whoa, I had no idea it was an actual term that’s applicable here. I thought the author was just creatively insulting the guy.
wayne-li2 2y ago
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.
eutropia 2y ago

deskr 2y ago

Considering what these guys have done to google search, I think this is the absolute minimum set of words they deserve.

deepakarora3 2y ago

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.

distances 2y ago
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.
- 1024core 2y ago
  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.
  - noirbot 2y ago
    Perhaps, but isn't the value of Kagi that it's user-tunable? If you open a page and it's distasteful to you, you can remove it from future searches, and you can uprank the sites you find useful. Related, no idea if they actually do it, but presumably, Kagi is getting signal from that about what people find useful, and integrating that into their rankings. If I run into SEO crap on Google, I'm not sure they ever know I hated it and went elsewhere. They see that I searched and I clicked, and they got their money and don't care.
barfbagginus 2y ago
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!

3abiton 2y ago

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.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

p3rls 2y ago

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.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago

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.

nullindividual 2y ago
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).
atif089 2y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
ninjaa 2y ago
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://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet
ozr 2y ago
The awesome-X lists seem like a community attempt to do something similar.

bimguy 2y ago

[flagged]

gorbachev 2y ago

About that... https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-products-and-game-google-with-parasite-seo/ https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr... Just saw this article on my news feed.