Between any web pages an average of 19 clicks

The law of “six handshakes” as applied to web pages turns into the law of 19 links. It says that from any web page on the web you can get to any other on average with 19 clicks of the mouse.


^{Partial internet map, according to The Opte project . Each line connects two IP addresses. The length of the line shows the ping between the nodes, the color of the line corresponds to the domain zone.}

The author of the new law is the Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási , yesterday his article was published in the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It was he who, in 1999, discovered the algorithm for generating random scaleless networks using the principle of preferred connection ( Barabashi-Albert model) Now the scientist has calculated that the network coefficient for the world wide web of modern scale is 19.

Barabashi is a specialist in network technologies, in 2002 he wrote the book “ Linked: a new science of networks ”, in which he talks about the network nature of many surrounding phenomena. The first statistical model for the Internet was back in 1999 (pdf) .

Due to the dynamic generation of documents, the total number of web pages on the Internet is considered to be infinite. The author of the study calculated the model with 1 trillion objects. Although there are well-known examples of pages without links , but in general they all form a random, scaleless network.

By the way, the domain 19clicks.comregistered in 2005, some girl who is now blogging there. She says that even at that time she thought that 19 links - this is the average distance between web pages. This is how women intuitively guess what physicists take years of scientific research to do.