The importance of the text that links

On the Financial Times Tech Blog Richard Waters discusses the challenge of search link descriptions (Bill's excellent (internet) adventure, April 17, 2007), discussing search auction pioneer Bill Gross's Snap.com service, which shows an image of pages linked to. Bill Gross is addressing an issue that has been known about for years in the discipline of human-computer interaction. There it is described as the 'rhetoric of departure' and there is a converse challenge, described as the 'rhetoric of arrival', ie: 'what is this thing I am on?'. (These terms are attributed by Jakob Nielsen to George P. Landow, author of Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization). Part of the problem is that journalists, as Waters illustrates, don't take the time to make the text of their links descriptive of the destination, by describing the thing, including key names and, ideally, making a readable phrase. At worst, the word 'here' is used as the link. While this may just about work in the context of the piece, the semantic value of having a URL with an in-built description is lost. Imagine a search engine that indexed richly described links as well as using existing search models (PageRank, etc). The results one would get would actually be descriptive of the thing linked to, and may also offer a judgement on it. Filtered by publications or people you trust, search could move to a new level. [This idea was first suggested to be by Bill Thompson in 2004, discussing Tim Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web.]