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How Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon Warped the Hyperlink (wired.co.uk)
The concept of the hyperlink was first outlined over 70 years ago and eventually became a central part of the web. But 30 years since the invention of the world wide web, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have skewed the original ambitions for hyperlinks, who they are for and how far they can lead you. From a feature story: The impact that Google's PageRank algorithms have had on how the commercial web chooses to deploy hyperlinks can be seen in just about any SEO (search engine optimisation) blog. Publishers and businesses are encouraged to prioritize internal links over external links that may boost the competition in Google's rankings. "Since the very moment Google came on the scene, links moved from being the defining characteristic of the web, to being a battleground. Google's core insight was that you could treat every link as, essentially, a vote for the site," says Adam Tinworth, a digital publishing strategist. Tinworth explains that Google tries to minimize the effect of these 'unnatural linking patterns', which includes comment spam and 'guest posts', but it remains part of "how the shadier side of the SEO industry operates."
With clear, financial incentives to serve Google's web spiders, which regularly 'crawl' website content to determine its placement in searches, a common strategy involves placing hyperlinks on specific 'anchor text' -- the actual words that you click on -- that benefit that site's PageRank for keywords rather than tailor links to readers. That's not inherently a problem but research from the University of Southampton, published in February, suggests it doesn't go unnoticed. [...] In the cases of Apple and Facebook, the question isn't so much how we link and how we react to them, as where we can link to and where we can follow links to. Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP all propose variations on limited systems of linking back to sources of information. As for Instagram, it's based on a two-tier system: users can't add external links to posts (#linkinbio) unless they buy adverts whereas accounts with a large number of followers are able to add external links to Stories.
With clear, financial incentives to serve Google's web spiders, which regularly 'crawl' website content to determine its placement in searches, a common strategy involves placing hyperlinks on specific 'anchor text' -- the actual words that you click on -- that benefit that site's PageRank for keywords rather than tailor links to readers. That's not inherently a problem but research from the University of Southampton, published in February, suggests it doesn't go unnoticed. [...] In the cases of Apple and Facebook, the question isn't so much how we link and how we react to them, as where we can link to and where we can follow links to. Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP all propose variations on limited systems of linking back to sources of information. As for Instagram, it's based on a two-tier system: users can't add external links to posts (#linkinbio) unless they buy adverts whereas accounts with a large number of followers are able to add external links to Stories.
I feel like a lot of these articles get into this "That's not what the Creator envisioned, so this is wrong" line of thinking. But you know? Things evolve to fit the needs of the person using them in their project. Boo hoo, Tim Berners-Lee doesn't like something... Well, he's not on my project team anyway.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Google really destroyed the internet from what it once was. They created what amounted to Observation Bias - once people knew that links were no longer just to naturally reference another website, links became weaponized.
But it didn't stop there, and I don't think Google caused this innocently. Google started actively punishing websites based on their links. Anyone remember "web rings"? They predated Google, and were a way for like-minded sites to link to each other **so that visitors to one site could find something else related to that site**. They were like mini-islands of sites that, if I remember right, shared a code that allowed you to see all the related sites. But that kind-of circumvents Google, doesn't it? So Google punished sites that used them.
Even if you think a webring was a sketchy way to game Google, remember how websites used to have a page of "links"? Those were just other sites that the owner either liked or felt were relevant. The link was the way of saying "hey, I like this, maybe you will too". But Google came down on them too, particularly if they found a reciprocating link back. Turns out that Google invented a non-standard tag called "nofollow" which they required webmasters to use (or else they would punish them) when linking to other "non-trusted" sites. This was mainly due to forum spam where users dropped in links - a massive problem, but one Google could have solved by simply recognizing user-generated forum content and discounting links within it.
So now, when someone makes a website, they just don't create links. Why bother? Links got people punished by Google, so why risk it just to show a little love? And since no one links to each other, we depend on Google - which is probably just what they wanted anyway.
skewed the original ambitions for hyperlinks, who they are for and how far they can lead you
The original "ambition" for hyperlinks was always, and will always be, curtailed by the dreaded 404. The instant you are relying on resources outside of your control it is just a matter of time before they are gone. That wonderful chain of links that lead you "far" is broken by one single 404 in the chain. Search engines bypass this exact problem by allowing us to directly access the destination without having to jump "far" through many links. The internet really could never have functioned very well as originally envisioned, where it was a huge collection of documents that referenced each other and provided gateways to new things to be discovered. An endless series of rabbit holes to keep going down and down. Maybe that''s fun on some level, but the usefulness quickly diminishes with the depth. At some point someone was going to start indexing things in a single collection to allow direct access - that was inevitable and was a required optimization. Search engines became hugely popular because they are very useful, and provide a solution to a weakness and limitation of pure HTML / HTTP.
Better known as 318230.