It works far less, though, since most people expect others to rely on search engines, so they don't bother to link anymore.

Here's a thought: browser extension that stores your "personal" web index, and gives you a typeahead menu when you write about concepts in your index, prompting you to convert phrases to links. Like the way Facebook always wants to convert the names of people and pages to tags. Even if it were just primed with Wikipedia, that would drastically reduce the amount of Google searching people need to do when reading stuff you write.