Comments on: Any Two Pages on the Web Are Connected By 19 Clicks or Less

By: inf3rno

inf3rno — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:19:47 +0000

By: http://leglesslegolegolas.com/ and http://zombo.com/

Navigate to http://leglesslegolegolas.com , one click on url input, type http://zombo.com , press enter and I’m there with just one click. :trollface:

By: Angela

Angela — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:54:23 +0000

No problem, I really think it’s an amazing example of how the internet works. Humanity’s burstiness causes bursts in the artifacts we leave behind, like article clicks!

By: Joseph Stromberg

Joseph Stromberg — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:25:12 +0000

Angela, thanks for pointing out the error. We’ve corrected the article.

By: Angela

Angela — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:58:30 +0000

Barabasi’s 19 degrees of separation result was published in 1999 in a Nature Magazine article titled “Internet: Diameter of the World-Wide Web.” The Philosophical Transactions article merely cited the result. But after this Smithsonian article, it got picked up all over the web and treated as “news.”
The cool thing, though, is that the mistake caused a spike in media activity surrounding Barabasi’s research, a function of the network on which the spike is taking place. I blogged about this weird meta-phenomenon yesterday, take a look: bit.ly/WbxdUW

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:51:25 +0000

Jon,

Or, alternatively, you can read about scale-free networks. If you go to the Wikipedia article about scale-free networks, there is an included image which gives a visual representation of such a network which can help you and others understand the idea better.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:47:58 +0000

Jon,

The “minority of pages” are “crucial nodes.” That is, they are “very highly connected” like Kevin Bacon happens to be. Bacon has been in enough films that it is possible to connect him with almost every actor with no more than six “links.” The “links” referred to in Bacon’s case are actors who have appeared in a film together. So, suppose Actor A has never been in a film with Bacon. However, Actor B has been in a film with Bacon. Then, somewhere along the line Actor A and Actor B were in a movie together. That means Actor A is “linked” to Bacon through Actor B. Of course, the chain can stretch out to include more actors, but it is claimed that at most one needs six such links to connect any actor in Hollywood to Bacon. That’s what Barabasi is talking about. These “crucial nodes” are the Bacon’s of the Web which allow us to navigate from Point A to Point J.

If you’d really like to know more about what Barabasi is talking about, you can read a limited amount from his book Linked through Amazon. Chapter 12 in particular addresses the Web. While it doesn’t include the material covered in the study above, it does cover some of the basic connections between network science/theory and the Web and how it behaves as a “network.”

By: bbgun

bbgun — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:52:08 +0000

try connect my email page to your email page with 19 clicks.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:00:18 +0000

@Mark: Blimey, you complain about poor reading comprehension, yet you clearly failed to read this blog post properly. How exactly should I interpret this following paragraph?

“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.”

The only reasonable interpretation I see is that the study is actually about clicking links to get from one page to another. Since the actual paper isn’t published in an open-access journal and therefore is pay-walled I can only guess as to what Barabási meant.

By: Kurnous

Kurnous — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:29:13 +0000

To Bob with his example of
http://leglesslegolegolas.com/ and http://zombo.com/
By posting those two hyperlinks, the pages are now linked through this webpage. Furthermore, you could easily reach both of these pages by navigating through the 4Chan Boards.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:37:49 +0000

The lamb of reading comprehension has be handily slaughtered on the altar of literalism in the scribblings above. I long for the days when comments are posted by educated folk capable of discovering and understanding the implied rather than those who have yet to move beyond the surface.

Internet Smart Guys: “It says, ‘Any two pages.’ That’s so stupid! What if pages don’t have links? Huh? Ever thought of that, wise guy?”

It’s clear neither Barabasi nor Stromberg understood or used “connected” to mean “linked.” /sarcasm

I mean, really, at what point does reading comprehension fail so mightily that one is not capable of inferring even shallowest layer in implied meaning?

By: Rev

Rev — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:23:31 +0000

UPDATE:

It still can’t beat the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon so I believe the world to be safe!

By: David

David — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:34:33 +0000

19 clicks or FEWER.

Journalistic standards, please.

By: David

David — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:30:52 +0000

1. Open a single-tabbed web browser.
2. Go to leglesslegolas.com.
3. Clear your browser cache.
4. Now, starting by clicking one of the hyperlinks within the leglesslegolas page, navigate to zombo.com in less than 19 clicks.
5. Can’t do it, can you? leglesslegolas.com has no outgoing hyperlinks.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:27:10 +0000

Carey, you’re misunderstanding.

Start at http://www.zombo.com

From there, navigate to http://leglesslegolegolas.com/ *by only clicking links*

You can’t.

By: DAnny

DAnny — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:07:23 +0000

So what about a page on the web and a page on the deep web?