What about making a firefox extension (or a greasemonkey script) that removes the referer when you click on a given link so that the target website would not be able to determine where you were coming from. It would work particularly well for AdSense. For instance it could nice to be given the option when clicking on an adsense link: "Do you want to credit this author? (yes / no)". If the user says no then the referer is removed and Google can not determine where you came from.

Let's push the idea a bit further, what about: "Do you want to credit this author more money?" which makes you click more than once on a given link. Or what about "Credit this author?" with a little dollar bill as the icon of a bookmarlet which automatically clicks on all AdSense links (or other systems) of the author's website.

>> It would work particularly well for AdSense.

But this isn't how AdSense works. Google doesn't check the referrer header – it uses redirects and the AdSense publisher code in the JavaScript (google_ad_client).

If you really wanted to avoid crediting the author, you'd need an extension/greasemonkey script that would strip the Google stuff out of the link being used by the AdSense ad – essentially just extracting the "adurl" parameter (I think).

And there are already tons of crappy security apps out there that block the referrer header – which is quite annoying for website owners who want to know where their traffic's coming from.

Well I see referer in the broader sense not necessarly the referer entry in the header but anything that could lead to know where the user is coming from. And so that's right for AdSense one would need to strip off the google part from the url to get a clean url.

I still think that fooling around with AdSense to credit more or less or not the author could be interesting.

Who benefits when you do this? The one who advertises their message, at the monetary expense of Google + the webmaster who put up the advertisement, and at the usability expense of the user (because of an additional yes/no question). So why would you want to do this?

Dunno maybe in order to simulate some kind of web communism where no money is involved thru linking ;)

It might be an interesting experiment to take off all money motivated links from the web. We would then analyze the structure of this 'none commercial' web and compare it to sites like wikipedia. Maybe the graphs may have a similar structure.

Imagine taking wikipedia apart from the web. An hypertext resource not compatible with the web so that there's no link between wikipedia and the web. Imagine taking this new 'wikipedia' to the size of the web. Which hypertext resource would you think would be more informative?

By Wikipedia's rule Wikipedia includes no original research – you are only allowed to post stuff you find in other places. Including websites! I'm sure that this rule isn't 100% followed, but still a great deal of Wikipedia's content comes from websites, blogs, etc. And a lot of its traffic – and traffic that convers to edits, which build the Wikipedia knowledge – come from links from other sites. So it's a symbiotic relationship that makes Wikipedia grow...

... a symbiotic relationship between wikipedia and the rest of human knowledge waiting to be poured in and synthesized.

Could we have a different web? One in which the process of linking isn't motivated by money a bit like in wikipedia. Where content creation and linking would follow strict rules in order to make a more harmonized hyperlink structure.

One big challenge for search engines might be to able distinguish between commercial linking and truly informative linking. For example most wikipedia links are informative. But spam of course isn't. I'm interested about the stuff in between. How could one measure how informative a link is?

A lot of people's links aren't motivated by money already, Alex. E.g. a good blogger will link to what they like, not to who paid them. Advertisement being an exception. I agree that Google would love to fully figure out which are ads and which aren't...