Sunday, February 20, 2011

Is "19 clicks" an outdated figure?

Barabási (2001) established that the diameter of the web was about 19, meaning that it takes on average 19 clicks to get from any one web page to any other. While he states that this is a very small number, considering the more than one billion web pages in existence, I wonder if this number has changed over the years. I have to imagine that the web is much more heavily used by a larger number of people now than it was ten years ago. And I would imagine that this statistic would be changed by ten years of changing usage. I think that fundamentally the internet itself has not been altered, the structure of the web is the same now as it was then, but I wonder if more web pages and more users leads to a smaller diameter. I wonder if it would be fruitful to recreate this study again to remeasure “The Physics of the Web”.


I also wonder, what are the pages that have the highest indegrees and outdegrees? With the rich get richer model, certain pages are more connected than others. What are these pages? Are they the sites that come to mind as commonly used sites, e.g. Google, Facebook, Youtube, or are they something else? And while I would expect that Google has an extremely high outdegree, how high is its indegree? And for Youtube I would expect the opposite, an extremely high indegree, but to what extent does Youtube link to other sites? I wish that the studies we read had named the top 10 sites for indegree and outdegree listing exactly what their degrees are.

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