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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
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!
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.
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 !!!!
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
No, you're on the internet. Don't confuse that with the web, please. I know /. has gone downhill over the past decade or so, but it hasn't reached AOL-ness yet. Let's not help it along, shall we?
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