It wasn't broken, and this isn't fixing it
On search engine optimization, social sharing cards, and the honorable pedigree of the hyperlink
Google’s pivot to artificial intelligence is resulting in a general deprecation of its classic link-based results page. While Google isn’t alone in this adoption of an AI-everywhere kind of strategy, it’s symptomatic of something that’s going to be a knowledge and information problem in the coming years.
■ As Emily Bender points out, lists of links actually serve a useful purpose by providing a sort of orientation to the landscape of knowledge on a subject: Not an authoritative single “answer”, but rather an array of possible avenues. And that’s how information works: Not everything is known, and not every known thing is the product of a universal consensus. It’s often just as important to see dissent as it is to see a purportedly “right” answer.
■ For those who were exposed to early iterations of the World Wide Web, there’s a certain degree of comfort with uncertainty (there was, believe it or not, a time before everything had a website). And there is also a very sensible understanding that links make the Internet work. Not paid advertising links or SEO-juicing reciprocal links, but real, honestly-meant links to supporting or extending information on a topic.
■ Hyperlinks are the essential footnotes of the Internet. Footnotes are for serious people. Footnotes are how we show our work. Footnotes enforce accountability. You can ignore footnotes, of course. But you shouldn’t! An Internet sans hyperlinks is little more than a giant wall covered in advertising posters.
■ Both spreadsheets and social media are much lessened by their basic lack of functional footnotes. Sure, a person can insert links into a social-media thread, but especially now that social-sharing cards force themselves into those threads and interrupt the flow of writing, it’s a distraction to do so in a way that a basic hyperlink never was.
■ Things purported as “features” are not always beneficial. Whether it’s the usurpation of semi-structured information (like the ten blue links of a classic Google search result) by AI-generated outputs or the conversion of basic links into attention-hogging social-sharing cards, there’s a real battle underway not just for the answers people want, but for their very structure. Hyperlinks, the modern footnotes, are part of an unbroken tradition with a multi-century history. We jettison them at our own peril.
