  Web search engines arguably form the most popular data-driven systems in
contemporary society. They wield a considerable power by functioning as
gatekeepers of the Web, with most user journeys on the Web beginning with them.
Starting from the late 1990s, search engines have been dominated by the
paradigm of link-based web search. In this paper, we critically analyze the
political economy of the paradigm of link-based web search, drawing upon
insights and methodologies from critical political economy. We draw several
insights on how link-based web search has led to phenomena that favor capital
through long-term structural changes on the Web, and how it has led to
accentuating unpaid digital labor and ecologically unsustainable practices,
among several others. We show how contemporary observations on the degrading
quality of link-based web search can be traced back to the internal
contradictions with the paradigm, and how such socio-technical phenomena may
lead to a disutility of the link-based web search model. Our contribution is
primarily on enhancing the understanding of the political economy of link-based
web search, and laying bare the phenomena at work, and implicitly catalyze the
search for alternative models.
