A question on backlinks

Basement
1

I have a question about backlinks.
I want to use them for research purposes on a very large number of notes.
I have written a BASH-script to “isolate” searchterms.
I simply searches for all the occurences of the search terms in all the files of the vaults and puts them between [[]].
Also an .md files is generated with the name of the search term and a list of all the notes where the searchterm appears in ![[]]format.

When using the Graphs - which are amazing by the way - you can see the clusters forming around the search terms and the ‘connections’ between the clusters.

image
image1188×1438 228 KB

What I tend to see is that the same Graphs can be generated when creating the .md files with list of notes where the term appears and not create the backlink ([[]]reference) in the file where the term appears.

I was wondering:
What would be the added value of putting the backlink reference in the notes where the search term appears?

Or do I oversee something essential that could be of any use later?

1 Like
2

Not sure I 100% follow you, but are you suggesting that if a note has something like this:

Here is my note about something important sauce

And let’s say “important sauce” is a note elsewhere, then automatically changing that to:

Here is my note about something [[important sauce]]

3

Sorry for the late reply. Not all prio could go to Obsidian the last days :wink:

The question is if I have to use the [[]] or what are the advantages because I tend to get the same graphs with or without them.

The scripts generates a “MOC” that has the name of the isolated term and inside all the references to the files (between [[]]) that contain the term to be isolated. When I do a local graph of this I get the result as shown.

The same happens when I do process the files and additionally put the term I want to isolate between [[]] (which I understand as backlinkling) in the files that contain the term to be isolated.

So I was wondering what the added benefits were because if you have lots of terms to isolate the readability of the processed file becomes a little bit of an issue in editors outside Obsidian and inside Obsidian when in edit mode.

4

Okay, I think I understand more of what you are doing. In my own workflow, I am careful about how I use [[]] for the same reason. There are other ways to connect and discover your notes without using these links.

You could think about the benefits of using these links as related to Obsidian features:

  • Do you want to see these links in the backlinks pane?
  • Do you want to see these links in the graph?
  • Do you want to be able to easily navigate from note to note in the editor?
  • There may be future features and plugins that use these links in different ways.

There are other apps that recognize the [[]] link format and now even apps that use the same heading link syntax [[filename#heading]].

5

OK. Sam,

That are useful insights.
Thanks for sharing.

Backlink pane - OK
Graphs - Already in there when making the MOC - No need to backlink for Graph coverage
Navigation - Back and forth would be handy in some case
Plugins - Let’s wait and see :wink:

Other apps - Apart from Typora and MarkDown which I only use for creation on iPad and iPhone there is no need for that kind of behaviour (for me) in other Apps. Obsidian is my Desktop App by default.