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Web: 19 Clicks Wide
InitZero writes "The journal Nature reports that the web is only 19 clicks wide. What it fails to mention is that a least one of those must be through Kevin Bacon. " The graphic at the beginning of the article is gorgeous in a Mandelbrot style-now if I could just have it in a 24 x 30 print.
that you are never more than two clicks from a porn site.
There's an additional study in Scientific American awhile back that shows evidence of that. The premise of the study was to create a search engine that refines the quality of web sites by giving them a "hub" and a "target" rating (I believe that was the terminology used). The "hub" rating was determined by the number and quality of the target sites the page linked to (quality being determined by the "target" score), and the "target" rating was determined by the number and quality of the "hubs" that linked to it. (again, quality determined by "hub" score) So they'd run the list of sites through several time using these, and each time the hub and target scores were refined by each other. Eventually stabilized scores are obtained by running this evaluation scheme enough. To relate it to the topic at hand in this thread, though, when they studied the web using these, individual communities of targets and hubs could be discerned by an above-average rate of linkage within the group.
The Source code for that mandelbrot set is available at Caida. My friend has been working on the project for quite some time, ever since graduating at UCSD. Most of the work is done by him in the San Diego Super Computer Center. Take a look at the software, it's java and Brad put a lot of cross platform testing into it. So it should run fine everywhere. (Java claim). It has a lot of really nice features to it.
Joseph Elwell.