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 still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.
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?
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!
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.
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!
I’ve also started to hoard a stash of links and pdfs. And I have Dash for languages and framework documentation. Too many SEO farms for Python and HTML/CSS/JS.
I just sound like I am GPT, because I am a pedantic autist that simply MUST split hairs about EVERYTHING
I honestly take it as a compliment
Consider using zotero to expand and organize your library of references, if you don't already use it or something like it. It does great for PDFs, but it also captures and stores local copies of websites. Also lets you create bibliographies.
Bing is.. fine I think nowadays
Strong disagree. The intentional usage of fallacious reasoning or histrionic name-calling weakens the credibility of the author, not of the post.
If someone screws you over, you lay out the reasoning for why you're angry at them and then you insult them. The insults are not the argument. They are the conclusion of the argument.
Once again if you see an insult, conclude someone is being histrionic, and refuse to see their actual sound arguments, then you are making the fallacy fallacy, and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
You are also making an ad hominem against the author - arguing against the personal credibility rather than the credibility of the actual argument. That specific kind of ad hominem is called tone policing.