Is a hyperlink a kind of informational public good? Links analysis algorithms on the web take the incoming links to a webpage as a sign of its popularity. Given this, can we consider web hyperlinks, in aggregate, as a kind of public good? I am curious if anyone has looked at it from this perspective.
In the Samuelson's definition of public good, the good must be non-excludable and non-rivalrous.

Hyperlinks (if public and pointing to public pages) are non-excludable, and --to the condition of not overloading the hosted content-- non-rivalrous.

The frequency of publication (and other criterions) of hyperlinks pointing to specific pages/domain, is used by ranking algorithms as a proxy of relevance for the users. 

Hyperlinks through ranking algorithms create a positive externality (i.e. access to more relevant web-pages). 
To the extent that the access to the result of those ranking algorithms is not excludable (you don't need to log in the use google, duckduckgo, etc), you can say that the result of this positive externality is a public good.