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You Can Navigate Between Any Two Websites In 19 Clicks Or Fewer
An anonymous reader writes "A study done by a Hungarian physicist found that of the billions of websites and over a trillion objects on the web, any given two are separated by no more than 19 clicks. 'Distributed across the entire web, though, are a minority of pages—search engines, indexes and aggregators—that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. These nodes serve as the "Kevin Bacons" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 19 clicks. Barabási credits this "small world" of the web to human nature—the fact that we tend to group into communities, whether in real life or the virtual world. The pages of the web aren't linked randomly, he says: They're organized in an interconnected hierarchy of organizational themes, including region, country and subject area. Interestingly, this means that no matter how large the web grows, the same interconnectedness will rule.'"
Oh yeah? Nobody links to my blog, because I haven't told anyone about it.
Who cares?
It is like that "your friends are only 6 friends away" crap, I have yet to see Facebook show me "People I know" that I actually know or care about.
I mean, there are objects behind paywalls that, all by themselves, can be more than 19 clicks away from a highly unrelated web page elsewhere online There are objects which are online that have no external links to them at all. And those are just the obvious ones.
It's an interesting notion, but it's incorrect.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's got to be a reasonably good, well-liked site, but not a mega-site like Google or Facebook.
How about Salon.com or theonion.com?
I would say /., but by its nature, /. has too many connections to be used for a Kevin Bacon number equivalent. Conversely, The Onion probably doesn't link to enough stuff.
I vote for Salon.com
An idea for a killing-time game.
Pick up a source and a destination website and from the source, try to reach the destination in less than 19 clicks.
I'm going to waste a few hours that way, I think =)
So how many clicks does it take to get from Tub Girl to Goatse?
Wait...don't answer that.
if everyone links to Google/ Facebook/twitter/Skype and a thousand other social media sites.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
"Interestingly, this means that no matter how large the web grows, the same interconnectedness will rule."
Prove it!
After all is said and done, it really is a small, small world.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I often go to a random video on YouTube and then try to get to a certain video just by clicking the suggested videos on the right side of the page. You must try it with videos you normally never watch, otherwise it's too easy. It's fun, you never know what you find on your way.
-- Cheers!
Not a chance, unless you're counting the number of clicks it takes to turn on the on-screen keyboard and type enough characters into Google search for a reliable suggestion to show up. Up until two years ago when I left academia I was with an Internet research lab at a major university, and I saw diagrams of some of the graphs collected by decently large web crawls of the time. None of them would have been clustered enough to allow jumping between two arbitrary sites in 19 clicks or less for three primary reasons:
1) Most links are unidirectional, not bidirectional (e.g. you might link to a news story, but the news site is unlikely to link back to you). As a result, it's rather difficult to reach sites on the fringe of the graph, since many of them have few or no links pointing to them.
2) Domains (as in domains like medicine, technology, and automobiles, not domain name like google.com) tend to be segregated from one another and oftentimes have long chains before they reach more clustered/common parts of the Internet (e.g. if you start at a particular site for a niche topic, there may be only one other site pointing to it, and then only one pointing to that one, and so on for quite awhile).
3) Many sites don't have any links to other sites. It's not as uncommon as you might think, and they'd all count as a dead end, which would obviously end your traversal if you were starting from that site.
When I used to see those graphs, most of them would exhibit chains that would dangle off of the main cluster and would stretch out for dozens or hundreds of sites in length, meaning that if you started from one of those sites in the middle, you'd have to go half that distance in either direction before you'd make it back to the main cluster. Even with as far as we've come in recent years, I seriously doubt that all of those chains have been eliminated.
If you read the actual article you'll find that his findings "involved a simulated model of the web that he created to better understand its structure. " So this article has nothing to do with the actual internet, but a simulation of it. It's not a noteworthy study, and I'm wondering why I wasted my time reading about it.
HAH!
"A study done by me has found that of the billions of websites and over a trillion objects on the web, any given two are separated by no more than 2 clicks. Distributed across the entire web, though, are links to search engines such as Google —that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. Google serves as the "Kevin Bacon" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 3 clicks."
I need my PhD. Now.
Why does the summary claim "sites" when the TFA clearly says any two pages? Oh well...
.: Max Romantschuk
I dont need to navigate to any website. It takes three clicks to Chasey Lane and that's all that's important:
- click on my bookmark to The Pirate Bay
- click on Search after I type her name
- click on the magnet link
Alright there's a fourth click to start the movie, and I have to reach over to the box of tissues, but we're talking about clicks here.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
In less than 30 seconds, I found http://www.arealbizop.com/. Please tell me the sequence of 19 clicks I should use to get from there to , well anywhere really.
I still consider the plain old file listings as websites. You can make the file hierarchy as deep as possible. Internet is pretty connected, but when imagining the movement between two websites as a landscape there are still deep canyons around.
I think it needs more rigor on what a click/link is allowed to be, as well as defining if it is a well-connected Internet; one that can be seen on the surface. The very real Internet is like the real world, you have to go the distance before you find something not known to you.
Some of you have probably heard about this already, but there is this fun game... With your buddy, you both open a random article in Wikipedia. Then you decide some common article that you both try to reach by clicking only Wikipedia article highlighted words. The one who reaches that article first, wins.
I think I do believe the study if we consider clicking the browser's back button to be fair game. I personally prefer the "alt"+"back arrow" shortcut but I guess clicking the button is still one click.
Step 1: Does your page have a link to Google? If yes:
Step 2: Google the page you want.
Step 1: Does your page have a link to Google? If no:
Step 2: Follow some link on it. Does the new page have a link to Google? If no:
Step 3: Follow some link on it. Does the new page have a link to Google? If no:
Step 4: Follow some link on it. Repeat until you are at Google.
What this indicates is that there are some websites that really hate Google.
The author has obviously never tried to navigate the Microsoft web site.
Of course, if you include Cisco's website in these results, it becomes 2^12 clicks.
*click on URL bar*
*enter URL*
*hit enter*
There, one click.
And my girlfriend wonders how it can be so easy to end up at a porn site several times a day...
That said, it's a fairly incredible claim. That's not that many deviations of Bacon, considering how many 'deadend' sites there are out there which don't link anywhere. How many of these sites are simply referral to search engines?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You cannot navigate ANYWHERE from the end of the internet: http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html.
re:If your pages are not connected via links to any extern sites, then by definitionem[sic], they are not part of the World Wide Web. You're wrong, in my opinion.
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Maybe you've got inbound links only, and no outbound links. You're still a webpage.
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Maybe your page has NO inbound links at all, and a couple of outbound links. Mebbe google and yahoo and bing and so on have not spider-crawled their way out to you, or you are so new and have no inbound links so the web-search-engines don't know you exist yet. You're still a web page if you can be accessed by an HTTP get request, eh?
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?? maybe you have no inbound links, no outbound links, and an url that was printed in an obscure newsletter: Spelunkers of San Diego, La Jolla Division. So someone has to read the url and type it in. You're still a webpage and part of the World Wide Web just like the other two categories above.
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You're part of the WWW if you can be reached by an "HTTP get" and respond with some content (doesn't have to be Hypertext-Markup-Language content, either; an url at http://example.com/text-files/i-am-so-on-the-www-v01.txt would also be a part of the world wide web).
reserve two domains
one with one page linking to the other page and just to be sure to what ever you like that is fairly popular..
and one page with no link...
So the page with no link will probably be harvested at some point and can be deemed as "part of the web"...
But no page can be reached from it...
Of course if you accept "both" directions as "acceptable paths", then it's harder, you could make a page that automatically detect that it's been harvested, and then change it's name, and randomly some of it's content, so it "kind of exists" but does not point to anything and although it can be "seen" from the web it cannot be "reached"...
You could call it heisenberg since you could not know at the same time it's position and it's content...
Click in address bar, type URL, hit enter key. In all actuality 99.9% of the internet is but one mouse click away.
How is this news? The author has a book called Linked (published in 2002 and actually a very good book) that already mentioned, in chapter 3, that the degree of separation is 19 (18.59 to be exact). It's interesting that it has not changed in 11 years but it's certainly not news !!!!
At any given time you are only up to* 1 location away from being inside or outside.
Serious what the hell is this ridiculous garbage?
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
You certainly cannot do this but waste half of your life trying to undo the metro system and have to do some registry changes and even that does not work to get rid of the offending system. There was a report on slashdot about M$ blaming manufacturers about the failure of Windows 8.
Here are some links below that will help you out;
http://www.classicshell.net/
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/149299-Method-to-hide-the-Charms-Bar
But that only helps so far as the damn thing does keep on appearing the only thing you can do after booting up is to run the metro killer
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Metro-Killer.shtml
The metro system is that intrusive that one might want to think about downgrading and you can get help with that from;
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/36726-UpDown8-Windows-8-Upgrade-Downgrade-Helper
hope that helps and if all else fails just get hirens boot cd; reformat and start over from scratch
Official untouched links to windows iso's Digital River here http://www.mydigitallife.info/download-windows-7-iso-official-32-bit-and-64-bit-direct-download-links
All cows eat grass!
Which is why governments are working hard to convince the masses to be scared enough to beg for government control. You know, for our protection from the big evil terrori^H^H^^H^H^H^H China.
They can't have us exercising our innate freedom to associate with each other as we choose. Need all kinds of cyberroadblocks where you have to present your TPM cyberpapers please.
Because: 1. new sites are created every day initially having no links to them. 2. websites can be and are created that have no external links in them.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v401/n6749/abs/401130a0.html
There are pages with no outgoing links. Before anyone yells "thats not part of the web", there are ingoing links, so its linked to the web.
Create three pages, one of which contains only links to the other two. Now "click" from one of the child pages to the other. On a more serious note - Google may well be a massive generator of links to other sites, but I fail to see its usefulness in being able to click through it to other sites - it does rely on textual input.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
I don't think Slashdot is the great hub you think it is. Every time I click a link here to somewhere else, the page never loads and is clearly broken.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Because no one has ever created a website with no external links.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Oh come on, including search engines? By that logic any two Wikipedia pages are separated by one click -- the search box. Seems to defeat the purpose of these sorts of exercises...
They constantly turn up in search results, but I never find anything useful there save for links, w/o any meaningful context --- the web would be a better place if the effort used for these sites would instead be funneled into better search results.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Bullshit.
Every site is only one click away plus a number of keystrokes. Also, this study seems to ignore my window manager.
Paul Erdös, not Kevin Bacon! Some are nerds here before all!
I have a tablet. I can't click.
Have gnu, will travel.
How do I go fom http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html to http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ or vice-versa?
So say we all
You are wrong
Sincerely
http://www.something.com
I can do it in zero clicks.
Press alt-left, to go back to google, type in new search, tab to result, press enter.
Try clicking your way into hidden NSA sites or their equivalents in other countries. 19 billion clicks wouldn't do it.
Isn't this a 'no shit' kind of article? Personally, I'm surprised it isn't fewer... My question is how much was the guy given in a grant to perform the research...
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
tpyo
[sic]
.onion mother fucker