There is an InformationWeek Article today about a new feature of Microsoft's Bing Search Engine. I want to point out a few absurdities about this article.

First, there is not a single useful context-sensitive link in the article. They're talking about features of other websites and they fail to provide links to these features. So I had to manually open a new tab, go to bing.com, and try to find the feature they're talking about. After a few moments of browsing around, I failed to find it - and gave up. Even now, I don't know what the hell the InformationWeek article was talking about. It sounds a lot like Bing's Images feature which it always had. Perhaps it was a feature Microsoft added to their main search, but pulled later for some reason. This would have been apparent if they provided a damned link.

Worse, the links they do provide are garbage. At first glance they might appear to go to an informative place, but instead they all lead to financial information or definitions. Financial information is fine. But the definition of "search engine"? What the hell do they take their readers for? Are there really people investing in these companies without knowing what a "search engine" is?

This is not limited to InformationWeek alone. Almost every online news organization suffers from this same problem. For instance, take a look at this New York Times article about Intuit's purchase of mint.com. No links to Intuit or Mint. An abundance of links to unrelated garbage, however. I'm not even going to go into their incredibly annoying "Lookup Word" feature.

See what I did there, with the links? I don't claim to be an amazing writer, but the importance of good links in an article is obvious to anyone who spent more than 10 minutes on the Web. In this respect, blogs are often better written than mainstream news articles. When you're talking about technology, it is extremely important to place good links in your article. On the other hand, advertisement or partnership-based links leave a very bad taste in your readers' mouths. They ruin your brand. And these companies wonder why they are going bankrupt.

They call it "The Web" for a reason, you know.