Suchmaschinen und Aggregatoren sind die „Kevin Bacons“ des Web

Surprising Science über die Erkenntnis, dass jede Webseite mit jeder anderen über 19 Links oder weniger verbunden ist:

Barabási’s findings, published yesterday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, involved a simulated model of the web that he created to better understand its structure. He discovered that of the roughly 1 trillion web documents in existence—the aforementioned 14 billion-plus pages, along with every image, video or other file hosted on every single one of them—the vast majority are poorly connected, linked to perhaps just a few other pages or documents.

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.

Man beachte auch die Tatsache, dass niemand auf die Vorstellung kommen würde, diese enorm wichtige Aufgabe würde von Presseangeboten geleistet.

Update:

 After publishing this article, it came to our attention that Barabási originally made this finding in 1999, and it was merely referenced in the recent publication. We regret the error.

Mir war nicht klar, dass die Studie von 1999 war. Die Entfernung von Webseite zu Webseite dürfte heute wesentlich geringer sein, da in den letzten 14 Jahren viele genuine Webdienste entstanden sind, die stärker Verlinkungen einbeziehen. (Twitter, Delicious, Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, etc.)

Fraglich bleibt, wie man bei einer neueren Untersuchung streambasierte Dienste einbeziehen würde.