Cory Doctorow
Too big to care: Enshittification is a choice
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
Writing is for everyone. Register for Medium Day —aaaaee ee
Too big to care
Enshittification is a choice.
Cory Doctorow Follow 5 min read · Apr 4, 2024 oC)
2K 15
1/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
I’m on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in Boston (Apr 11) with Randall “XKCD” Munroe, Providence (Apr 12) and beyond!
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo,
2/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:
- https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not feeling lucky/#fundamental laws of economics
Not coincidentally, Google’s search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important
resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with Open in app Sign up Sign in r Co) a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results: Search Write
- - - - - - https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im feeling unlucky/#not up to the task
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.
This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:
3/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
- - - - - - https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the map is not the territory/#apor locksmith
And here’s the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you’ll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.
When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle , I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I’ve know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).
We were sitting in his living room on our laptops — just like old times! — and Patrick asked me if I’d tried Kagi, a new search-engine.
Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the “lenses” that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.
I hadn’t even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know — both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…
I tried it. It was . magic
No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi — the right answers, over and over again.
That was before I started playing with Kagi’s lenses and other bells and sorcerous . whistles, which elevated the search experience from “magic” to
4/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
The catch is that Kagi costs money — after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):
= = https://kagi.com/settings?p billing_plan&plan family
Get Cory Doctorow’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer. Enter your email Subscribe
I immediately bought a family plan. I’ve been using it for a month. I’ve basically stopped using Google search altogether.
Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler’s 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:
- https://www.404media.co/friendship ended with google now kagi is my - best friend/
Koebler’s piece contained a key detail that I’d somehow missed:
When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So,
5/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.
In other words: . Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google
The implications of this are stunning . It means that Google’s enshittified search-results are a choice . Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature , not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:
- 2024 home use https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best printer - - - - office use labels school homework
No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their “competitors” like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin’ Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.
One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company”:
https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml
Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing :
6/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v oaDTiWaYfcM
The coverage of Khan’s appearance has focused on Stewart’s revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):
- its own https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple got caught censoring
But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as “too big to care.”
What a phrase!
Since the subprime crisis, we’re all familiar with businesses being “too big to care fail” and “too big to jail.” But “too big to ?” Oof, that got me right in the . feels
Because that’s what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That’s what it feels like to discover that Kagi — the good search engine — is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.
Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:
- https://www.vox.com/future perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google cancels ai - ethics board
Google doesn’t care anymore. They don’t have to. They’re the search company.
7/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
- - - - https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach me how to shruggie/#kagi
Google Enshittification Kagi Search Lina Khan Some rights reserved ®
Written by Cory Doctorow Follow 202K followers · 600 following =
Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: - https://pluralistic.net/plura list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Responses (15)
Write a response What are your thoughts?
8/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
zeke woollett Apr 4, 2024
Need more on the whole "buyback our stocks for a small fortune and then layoff a bunch of people" stock pump scam. I mean, it almost seems like a bunch of c-suites sitting in a room and someone says "well sht - we've got so much cash lying around … more
==> picture [124 x 20] intentionally omitted <==
Peter Guyton Apr 5, 2024
Huge Kagi fan here. For $5, anyone can try it for 300 searches. I did that 9 months ago and never looked back.
Also the unlimited tier includes FastGPT which will summarize the content of the search results really nicely. Google doesn’t do that… more
44 Reply __.
Pax Ahimsa Gethen they/them Apr 4, 2024
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic.
Yep, you and I are about the same age (I'm 54) so I remember everything that led up to Google as well. Whereas Gen Alpha and most of Gen Z have never known life without this enshittified behemoth. Scary.
I also remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil"...
==> picture [120 x 20] intentionally omitted <==
See all responses
9/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
More from Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
The enshittification of tech jobs
Our last line of defense has fallen.
Maga’s boss class think they are immune to American carnage
They’re in for a surprise.
==> picture [375 x 10] intentionally omitted <==
10/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
Cory Doctorow
Zuckermuskian solipsism
They just don’t think other people are real.
Cory Doctorow
Bluesky creates the world’s weirdest, hardest-to-understand…
What, and I cannot stress this enough, the FUCK does this mean?!
Aug 18 2.8K 32
==> picture [111 x 10] intentionally omitted <==
See all from Cory Doctorow
Recommended from Medium
11/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
Cory Doctorow
Eva Keiffenheim
Why Wikipedia works
Agreeing on source notability, not facts.
The Smartest People I Know Are Obsessed With a Skill Many Were…
The same technology promising to make us smarter is preventing the one thing our brain…
2d ago 796 7
In The Index by Joan Westenberg
Why Beautiful Apps Always Die the Same Way
Arc’s Big, Beautiful Exit
==> picture [111 x 10] intentionally omitted <==
Abhinav
Why Microservices Are Out and Monoliths Are Making a Comeback
For years, we were told microservices were the future.
==> picture [115 x 10] intentionally omitted <==
Andrew Zuo
Apple Can’t Figure Out AI Because There’s Nothing To Figure Out
Despite massive investments and widespread hype, the promised revolution of AI might be…
==> picture [112 x 10] intentionally omitted <==
In Write A Catalyst by MKWriteshere
AI Experts Return from China Stunned: America’s Grid Is So We…
Silicon Valley researchers discover China treats unlimited electricity as “a given,” while…
12/13
Too big to care. Enshittification is a choice. | by Cory Doctorow | Medium
9/7/25, 11:20 AM
Jul 29 1.8K 116
Aug 21 5K 118
See more recommendations
13/13