Between any web pages average 19 clicks

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


^{Partial map of the Internet, according to the project The Opte . 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 Barabasi (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 scale-free networks using the principle of preferred connection ( the Barabasi-Albert model ). Now the scientist has calculated that the network coefficient for the World Wide Web on a modern scale is 19.
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Barabasi is a network technology specialist; in 2002 he wrote the book “ Linked: A New Network Science ”, which 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 a model with 1 trillion objects. Although there are well-known examples of pages without links , but in general they all form a random, scale-free network.

By the way, the domain 19clicks.com was registered in 2005 by some girl who now maintains a blog there. She says that even at that time it seemed to her that 19 links are the average distance between web pages. This is how women intuitively guess what physicists take years of research.