Why do we put names first in bibliographies? While adding references to a .bib file the other day I found myself putting the title field first as it provided more information about the citations than the author names. After some thought, I wondered why most bibliography formats don't do that to begin with; if the primary goal of references is to provide support for the topic at hand while also giving proper attribution to existing works and to provide avenues for further research by readers, would it not make more sense to put the titles of papers/articles/etc. first and then the author names? It seems to me that the important thing (in terms of the work being written) is not who wrote the cited works but the works themselves, and if citing multiple papers by the same person putting the name first provides somewhat of a distraction from the actual content of the citations. Particularly in the case of collaborative efforts, where a work may have been written by a multitude of people, the title of the work can get pushed aside by the multitude of names (at least when using a format that doesn't just collapse the names to "et al"). What are the underlying reasons for this, or is it just a social thing that happened because researchers like having a significant effect in their fields/their careers depend on it?
This Question makes sense in practical terms, but includes a misconception in the area of academic culture, when you say, 'if the primary goal of references is to provide support for the topic at hand [...]'.  That is not quite right.

Also, disciplined academic writing tends to take the form of a dialogue (or in simple cases a dialectic), where differing perspectives are chucked into an arena and required to fight it out.  None of them necessarily has to 'win':  finding them all to be wrong is a positive result.

It is very often useful to label a view primarily as emerging historically from the body of some identifiable person's work, rather than hovering it vaguely in conceptual space.

Referencing has two primary goals.

The first is to help interested readers to identify and follow-up the material that you have recruited for your argument, so that they can, if they wish, follow your evidence in detail and, perhaps, find the stuff that you left out.  The idea is (partly) that you have openly saved a reader time in either embracing or challenging your position.  Under present archival conventions, the tracking-down of sources for this purpose (or any other) is almost always most efficiently done by starting with author name.  Scrambling for titles on the web, although I now do it every day, does not (yet) count as an archival convention.

Second, referencing is part of the process of locating yourself in the critical discourse of whatever discipline you are working in.  Your writing is in some sense an act of positioning your view in relation to others', even (or perhaps especially) if some other person's view has shifted over time.

For example...  In film studies it would seem rather ignorant to talk about 'the male gaze' as a convention of camerawork and editing without (a) attributing the expression to Laura Mulvey and (b) noting that she changed her view over time (see Wikipedia, for shorthand).

Merely referring to ideas from published articles, blog posts or even comments by anyone is fine in its place (e.g. my doctoral thesis, here and there).  For the most part, however, it usually works best to say something like, 'Aristotle proposes [an impressive idea].  Hitler disagrees [here, because of this].
Colonel Sanders inadvertently resolves that conceptual conflict by suggesting [that surprising thing].

That is also why we use the present tense:  'Roland Barthes says [something].  Michel Foucault (while never identifying Barthes) responds by saying [something that works far better in the real world].'  You are taking part in a present debate, with points of view that are most efficiently located by identifying their authors.