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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.'"
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
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.
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
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.
Then maybe your blog is not part of the World Wide Web, it's just based on the same technologies and can be reached via the same means.
*click on URL bar*
*enter URL*
*hit enter*
There, one click.
Ahhh Science! Is there anything you can't reason!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
You click "send", to send out the email.
You click "Google"
You click "search" after typing "lawyer".
The next click is the key in the lock of your new cell^H^H^H^Hhome.
And maybe you'll "click" with your new roommate, Bubba.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Remind me never to hire you as a programmer.
"His name was James Damore."
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
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).
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.
(not to say your blog is crap just saying in general the net is full of crap).
I fully proclaim* that all my personal webpages are full of crap, and add no value to the internet.
* vs admit; proactive vs reactive.
Wait... you consider your 4chan profile a "personal website" ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
This thread is one gigantic breeding ground for the No True Scotsman fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
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.
between two facebook profiles.
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.
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.
Every site is only one click away plus a number of keystrokes. Also, this study seems to ignore my window manager.
It is like that "your friends are only 6 friends away" crap
You're reading it wrong. It's not that 'friends' are six friends away, it's that every other person on FB is connected by a max of six other connections (or whatever). So if you were to connect to me, it would take a max of six connections. LinkedIn actually demonstrates this pretty well when you search a random person.
This thread is one gigantic breeding ground for the No True Scotsman fallacy.
How is that? Sique was just responding that merely having an HTML page does not mean that the page is on the World Wide Web. To be on the web you need at least some level of interconnectivity with the rest of the web.
There are plenty of other entities, such as corporate intranets, that use the same underlying technologies as the World Wide Web but would not be considered to be on the web. That is the reason we have different terms such as Internet, Intranet, World Wide Web, etc. They are not completely interchangeable.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
If it is physically connected to the rest of the "World Wide Web" then it is part of the "World Wide Web".
The lack of interested parties linking to it has no bearing.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Sigh, no. Actually, this is a mis-statement of Kevin Bacon theory, first proposed when Stanley Milgrim devised an experiment where he wrote fan mail to Kevin Bacon and distributed it through a random process to several people throughout the country, asking them to attempt to deliver it by handing it to a personal friend and asking them to do the same. On average, Kevin recieved them all within 6 transfers.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Facebook is talking about averages. I thought the 6 degrees of separation was a maximum? By going through someone I know that knows someone that knows someone through 6 levels, I am connected to Mkeli Mtumbo in deepest darkest Africa. Now, if you go by Facebook profiles, then you start with people who I am connected to, which is none because i don't have a Facebook account, then try to get to Mkeli Mtumbo who also doesn't have a Facebook account, well it just doesn't work. So Facebook has to use averages. And since only a limited subset of people actually have a Facebook account, naturally the separation is going to be smaller.
The people in my Church all know each other through two degrees of separation. They all either know each other, or know each other through another contact, mostly through the pastors.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I have a tablet. I can't click.
Have gnu, will travel.
4chan Profile for: Anonymous
/b/
Employer:
Occupation: Legion
Hobbies: Not forgiving, not forgetting, being expected
That's where I stopped reading.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
How do I go fom http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html to http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ or vice-versa?
So say we all
He didn't say "interest," he said "interconnectivity."
If you've got a wordpress install in a back room somewhere, with no links coming in, making it some sort of wiki "orphaned page" analog, then it really doesn't make sense to consider it part of the web.
Actually, I think that 4chan is useful, and does add value.
I consider it a sort of overpressure relief valve. Go read The Shockwave Rider (feel free to get it from anywhere you like, including libraries), compare 4chan to Hearing Aid.
My personal webpages, on the other hand, exist primarily for me to experiment (badly) with HTML and Apache configurations.
Well... yea the world wide web definition is a bit grey if you think of it that way, but you can still access it from the WWW via http, so thereby it is a part of the WWW, it's just not a very known part it seems.
Intranet != Internet
Even better example (not being distracted by one link that happens to be a redirect to itself): http://www.something.com/
Have fun getting from *there* to anywhere else...
Sique was just responding that merely having an HTML page does not mean that the page is on the World Wide Web. To be on the web you need at least some level of interconnectivity with the rest of the web.
Step 1. Build two web sites, neither of them linking to the outside world.
Step 2. Have the web link to both of them (if they're notable, try mentioning them on Wikipedia, e.g.)
Step 3. Starting on web site 1, try reaching web site 2.
Ezekiel 23:20
I can do it in zero clicks.
Press alt-left, to go back to google, type in new search, tab to result, press enter.
Google says it's Chasey Lain.
Also that woman is hideous.
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
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
What about if it's a page hosted by my ISP but which you can't get to without typing in the URL directly? I would consider that to be on the web despite being disconnected.
No, a fallacy is only a No True Scotsman fallacy if the reasoning includes the words 'No True Scotsman'.
Can't see any of those around here.
Oh wait...
tpyo
[sic]
Yeah I noticed the typo later. She won't return my fan mail, I guess.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
You're wrong.
Period.
Done.
Over.
Fini.