Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself.
Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it. This is just bog-standard HN moderation regarding titles. I skimmed the article looking for a representative phrase and couldn't find one on first pass. That is rather unusual and when it happens I sometimes ask the community for help.
Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.
That's what the article is arguing though. That a certain individual is 'killing' (not killed yet) Google Search. A different title would be misleading.
I didn't read it, I skimmed it. In this context, "read" means "read it enough to form my own view of the story"; "skim" means "read it enough for moderation purposes", such as title editing.
Moderation relies on the fact that those two are not the same. It is impossible to read all the articles; it is possible to skim enough of them to make moderation feasible.
(I did end up reading the OP out of curiosity later. My own view of the story is that I am pretty persuaded by it, but I don't like the personal attack aspect, which shows up as a mob dynamic in the comments here.)
This implies that posting a multi-paragraph comment on an article without bothering to read it, as dang did here, is the standard that HN should aspire to going forward.
I didn't post about the article. I posted about how to moderate the title on HN, which is my job, and which does not require reading every article*, though it does require skimming some of them.
Linkbait is about using tricks to grab attention rather than providing neutral information. Hyperbole is only one way to do that.
In this case "The man who" is a linkbait trope and "killed" is a sensational attention-grabby word. Composing them into "the man who killed" is linkbait.
The headline makes a promise and the article delivers on it.
At this stage, I think your reading is idiosyncratic and not an actual problem with the headline in relation to the article.
Editorialising it with a question mark that is not present in the article - which makes its case - is particularly inappropriate, as it makes it look like the article is asking a Betteridge question for a headline. This is you misrepresenting the article.
"The man who killed Google Search" is too baity. See the 'unless' in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"
Edit (since there are objections): I'm not taking a position for or against the article; I haven't read it. This is just bog-standard HN moderation regarding titles. I skimmed the article looking for a representative phrase and couldn't find one on first pass. That is rather unusual and when it happens I sometimes ask the community for help.
Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.