[zozbot234]

Search used to rely on formalized 'ad-hoc' curation in the form of DMOZ and other web directories. Without it, SEO has become the main influence on results and search-engines are now heavily focusing on novelty and recency in the hope of turning up something that the user was actually looking for. Of course 'novelty' is the polar opposite of something like textfiles, or of many well-established online resources.

[londons_explore]

While links have in the past been used to rank webpages, it isn't strictly necessary. You could have billions of documents and still figure out which one answers a question simply with a good ML model looking at the text of the documents alone.