“Enshittification” is a new word, first seen online less than a month ago. Google it today and you will discover that it has already found its way onto more than 45,000 websites, used in countless articles describing the multitude of ways the Internet has become so shitty.
The word was coined by Cory Doctorow, a longtime editor at the pioneering blog site bOING bOING. While his piece is focused on the social media giant TikTok, its scathing critique can be applied to practically every major online endeavor today. Sadly.
Recently, of course, Elon Musk has delivered a master class in deploying the Midas Touch of Shit. But he is not the first once-noble tech titan to go to the dark side. As a longtime editor and publisher of online media enterprises, I have been personally fixated on the enshittification of Google since way before the word existed. Google used to help us find all the cool stuff on the web—now Google sends way too much of its traffic to Google, while starving those of us legitimately in the "content" business. I was happy to find these succinct insights in Doctorow’s piece.
Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin's landmark 1998 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, “Advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”
Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today's Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren't good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.
Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees …
