Word of the Year: Enshitification

Search engines need ethics, too

Enshitification is what happens when principles go out the window.

Principles like service, like honor, like honesty, like “a little looking for the other fella,” as James Stewart said in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, are what make civilization possible. When they disappear, as they have over the last several years, it doesn’t matter much what your system is or what your laws say. Those with power will take it, and only the strongest will survive.

This is mostly discussed today in the realm of politics. Words have lost their meaning and are often used to mean their opposite in the name of victory. Facts mean nothing and are simply denied in the name of power.

Tyrants always seek enshitification. If there is no good, then there can be no bad. Nihilism becomes all that matters, and everybody below is crushed. Those at the top enact the Game of Thrones and there’s only one winner.

Vladimir Putin likes enshitification. Xi Jinping likes enshitification. MBS loves it, as does Benjamin Netanyahu. There are dozens of African dictators who subscribe to it. The danger is that if most Americans give up on the very idea of principle, as nearly half seem to have done since 2016, I’m for giving the planet to the cockroaches. That must be God’s plan, too.

But it wasn’t politics that motivated this screed.

It was search engines.

Search engines, especially Google, have become vital utilities in the 21^st century. But Alphabet is a public company, its goal is always to make more money, so it has taken full advantage of its position, enshitifying itself to the detriment of its customers.

I noticed this while trying to research my own stuff for recent articles at InvestorPlace. On any popular search, the top results are reserved for those who will pay for placement. The rest of the home page goes to Search Engine Optimization folks, using software to game the system in lieu of paying Google to do it for them. In a search under my own name, there are now just 7 pages of results, and one-third of them don’t relate to me.

In other words, Google is no longer indexing the whole web. They’re indexing what they’re paid to index, and what some people game them to index. My first web site, a-clue.com, no longer appears there at all.

It got worse when, in frustration, I tried Bing to find some old news stories. It found some but wrapped them up around its own MSN.Com URL, so I couldn’t even link to them. This is the kind of infantile behavior that supposedly went out of style in 1997. It came back because no one was looking and Microsoft cares more about profit than principle.

Fixing search engines will be well down the list when Americans finally get on their hind legs and decide to end enshitification, assuming we ever do. We can demand principles be followed, not just laws. We can demand honest dealing. We can demand adherence to ethical standards, by rejecting anyone without them. But that work has yet to begin. Until it does, enshitification will continue.