The world is small, previous studies have shown, as any two people in the world are connected through six mutual acquaintances. The same appears to happen on the Internet, as any two websites are at most 19 links apart, estimates a physicist specializing in network architecture.
Albert-László Barabási, a Hungarian physicist at Northeastern University in Boston, developed algorithms that identify and follow all the links on a webpage, and then repeat the process over and over again.
Everything is connected to everything. Map of the World Wide Web from the Opte Program, which has no relation to the new study: (Source: Opte Project)
The digital world
Barabasi estimates that the World Wide Web is actually a «small world» of about one trillion documents, which are at most 19 links apart from each other. This means that one can get from one webpage to another with relatively few «clicks», without using a search engine.
The physicist notes that, when the Internet began to develop in the 1990s, experts believed that it «had the properties of a random network», in which some websites are completely isolated from each other.
Barabasi believes that the situation changed with the emergence «supernodes» such as Facebook and Google’s services. Just as some people are more social than others and have more acquaintances, these «supernodes» contain many more connections. The researcher even warns that possible cyber attacks on the supernodes would lead to the «dissolution of the Internet» and would leave many websites inaccessible. Barabasi’s first study on the topic was published in 1999 in the journal Nature. The new, broader study is published in the prestigious journal Philosophical Transaction of the British Royal Society, of which the physicist is a member.
