The other day, I was doing Quordle, the version of Wordle that involves solving four grids at once. Who knew there were that many five-letter words in the English language? And speaking of English, there are a lot of words that the New York Times (owner of Wordle) and Merriam-Webster (the owner of Quordle) put in their grids that are only marginally English. For example, saute (without the accent of its French origin), metro (which seems like either a prefix or an abbreviation to me), and rupee (the name of the Indian currency). But, okay. On that day, I solved the word: ralph.
Now, I’m pretty handy with words, and I got this one because logic led me straight there, and yet I remained puzzled. What is this word ralph? Since I was in Quordle, I hit the search bar, which already said Merriam-Webster, thinking it would take me to the dictionary. After all, isn’t that why the company bought the puzzle? To drive traffic to its site? But the search bar was Google’s. Of course it was. What was I thinking?
I then proceeded down Enshittification Road. For those new to this concept, its originator, Cory Doctorow, sums it up nicely this way: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification …”
Once upon a time, Google was a magical search engine that produced results so beautiful that often the very first entry was the one you wanted. It was so magnificent that it drove every other search engine (remember Lycos? AltaVista? Yahoo! Search? Me, neither) off the map.
When I dropped “ralph” into this formerly great tool, what do you think I got? Well, an entire first page of Ralph Lauren, natch, first the sponsored content (first is what sponsors pay for) and then the organic results, which had also been polluted by the clothing company’s SEO mavens. Even Wikipedia, the last great noncommercial website, had capitulated, bringing further free advertising to the commercial entity. Keep scrolling, keep scrolling.
On to the Ralph Lauren locations, brought to you by Google Maps. Then, all the stupid queries by other searchers: Is Ralph Lauren a high…
