How Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon Warped the Hyperlink (wired.co.uk) 63
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.
So? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: So? (Score:2)
+1 Reality
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The problem is the creation of silos. Following this trajectory, we're going to end up with CompuServe all over again. Google wants you trapped inside their walled garden. When they started out with "Organizing the worlds information" - They went "hey we're like a library" that makes it easy to find information. Increasingly, they don't want you actually checking out that book or leaving their site. Now, they want you to capitalize on content that they don't create, and copy-paste it with their ads inserted
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't understand how Google works anyway. It's a trade secret and they are almost certainly wrong.
Plus they are making their own sites more shitty. When I read an article about something on the web, I expect a link. If you don't have a link to it you probably screwed up, except for rare cases where there is some reasonable justification.
Google probably knows that that likely down-ranks sites that are all internal links and no external ones.
SEO is the worst kind of shit shovelling. Make a good site, people will come. SEO a site and it will just degenerate into clickbait crap.
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These days Tim supports W3C DRM standards.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
One "evolution" I could live without is the idea of replacing hyperlinks with proprietary Javascript. In the HTML, the hyperlink looks normal, but scripting is used to "disable" the browser's standard navigation and allow the script to handle events. The result is that a large number of web pages work like those old Flash sites, where standard browser navigation doesn't work. You know, so you can't open links in a new tab/window, and you can't "Copy link location".
You'd think with the death of Flash, we could finally get away from breaking standards for the sake of propriety crap in the name of innovation. Nope. All these UX idiots don't understand why the web was designed as a document-centric architecture and why it's better, and they keep trying to force things to be application-centric. That's why they keep breaking everything.
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Why do you blame UX people, when javascript libraries are squarely at the hands of developers?
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Why do you blame UX people, when javascript libraries are squarely at the hands of developers?
Well one is like blaming the shooter and the other is blaming the gun maker.
Re: So? (Score:2, Funny)
I blame their parents.
Google warped it the most (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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> Google ... created what amounted to Observation Bias
Do you actually believe this?
Re:Google warped it the most (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, absolutely, but I think I used the wrong term. I think the term is "Hawthorne Effect". Hawthorne Effect is when the people who know they are being watched no longer act naturally.
Google had good insight that links amounted to "votes" - webmasters themselves linked to other sites they liked, the more links a site had, the more "votes" it got by people who were more than just novices.
But once sites figured out that Google was doing this, they created artificial links wherever they could. Sometimes it was via shady link exchanges, and then it morphed into forum spam, which essentially made running a forum 100x harder. The forum spam wasn't about getting visitors, it was all about getting pagerank.
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It's Goodhart's Law [wikipedia.org].
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Google didn't punish web rings, in fact they benefit your google ranking by associating with other related sites.
What killed web rings was the rise of alternatives to personal home pages. Rather than curate HTML people moved to blogs and social media where they could post material in a click or two. Those platforms all have their own linking systems that make building the community up easier. They are more effective at doing it too because they include comments and discovery tools that personal home pages u
shadier side (Score:1)
"how the shadier side of the SEO industry operates"
There is only the shady side of SEO. It's 100% trying to manipulate search engine rankings to your own benefit.
One of those not like the others (Score:2)
Hold up. While all three of Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News seek to commoditize content creators by—to varying degrees—reducing the obviousness of content attribution, causing content creators to lose control of their content and how it's displayed, and eliminating a direct interaction between content creators and their users, Apple News is different in one key way: it doesn't operate on the Web.
Unlike AMP and Instant Articles, which operate via the Web while subverting and
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So what you're saying is, Apple News is more like AOL from the old days.
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Not really, no. AOL presented the open Web as a set of gated channels under their control, which is an even worse subversion of how the Web is supposed to operate than what either AMP or Instant Articles is doing. Apple News isn’t presenting Web-based content at all. Again, it’s a parallel system.
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So AOL was less closed and proprietary than Apple News is going to be.
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Are you suggesting that a closed platform attempting to lock down access to an open platform is in some way better than a platform that is closed through-and-through? If so, you’ve got some twisted priorities. The former is nearly always a bigger threat to openness than the latter will ever be.
You also seem to be unaware that Apple News has been out for several years, given your choice of tense.
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Really? (Score:2)
In this edition of "big scary companies are ruining everything for profit," an author doesn't know about canonical URLs
*Capitalism Warped the Hyperlink (Score:2)
Internal links vs external, 404 city (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not just the biggo's (Score:1)
As much as the Big Tech co's do slimy shit, a lot of this is all kinds of organizations, big and small, battling for eyeballs to increase sales and lobbying power.
Ancient news... (Score:2)
Geez, this isn't even old news, it's ancient news. I suppose each new generation of web developers needs to understand that search engines include links (and link texts) in their ratings, but I remember teaching this stuff to my students 20 years ago. Why is this any sort of "feature story" on a tech site like Wired? Maybe they just hired a new intern, who re-discovered the wheel?
At least as much good as harm (Score:2)
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