You Can Navigate Between Any Two Websites In 19 Clicks Or Fewer 185
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.'"
So Which Web Site is the Kevin Bacon Equivalent? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Like most overgeneralizations... (Score:4, Interesting)
Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at least one link into your web from another.
So yes, to be part of the World Wide Web, your site has to have at least one link from another site -- otherwise it's not part of the public World Wide Web. It's the same with the Internet. Of course you can create another network using IPv4 or IPv6 to connect the nodes to each other, but as long as there is no external link into it, it's just an intranet and not part of the Internet.