There was a couple. And the couple was chatting. "Honey, but how do we get to the fields?", asked the spouse. "Let's ask Google, Google knows everything"... the spouse answered. And the couple smiled, and Googled away for the fields..., "I told you honey, Google knows everything" said the spouse. The spouse smiled, and clicked on the links for the fields... "tell me more Google" she said to herself. ...but the link was broken - 404 Page Not found! "What the ..." the spouse said... ...and the couple never found the answer... The End.
On the serious side, the above is trying to make a point. The fictitious couple probably represents a large segment of the Web users — access to the Web is increasing, yet not everyone is technical-savvy. At the end of the day, for everyone and anyone, a broken hyperlink is just a bad experience. For many web users, the Web, or the search engine, is broken, even though you and me know it's not the Web or the search engine per-se what is broken.
Search engines, with their robots, already have the capability to help minimize the bad experiences such as the one experienced by our
fictitious couple. At the center of the web is the hyperlink. The solution is to have the hyperlinks themselves reflect their quality, through the use of visual (or not) cues, for example mapping quality to font size, or color. Broken hyperlinks are clearly identified beforehand, minimizing unwanted surprises such as the '404 Page Not found!”. The concept can be extended to represent other characteristics such as frequency and importance. Let's call this a Multi-cue Hyperlink.
Multi-cue hyperlinks can be implemented purely on the client-side, with more limited functionality (meaning, search engines can provide much more information or cues, as they can carefully analyze each hyperlink and their relationships and state), via extensions, such as Firefox extensions. Once I find the time, I will explore this. A quick search revealed a Firefox extension called TargetAlert, which could serve as a starting point for Multi-cue Hyperlinks…
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