Early era websites were full of links to other sites. This sort of confuses two different purposes, however: navigation (and thus assumptions about context, us

Early era websites were full of links to other sites. This sort of confuses two different purposes, however: navigation (and thus assumptions about context, use and train of thought in the viewer) is confused with data (actual content). The semantic web tried and failed to fix this, probably because any solution to a puzzling situation involving educating people, asking them to put in substantially more effort, and assuming they have the capacity and foresight to think clearly and abstractly at multiple levels is fundamentally flawed. Thus, search engines are not bad: it would be best if they were less centralized, however. In a sense, this is becoming the case: people search less as they obtain better results from their browser history, QR codes, etc.