If you want to travel from one webpage to another, you can make the jump in no more than 19 clicks. A new study published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society has found that all of the planets’ publicly available websites are connected by no more than 19 static web links.
Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási, author of the network theory book, Linked: The New Science of Networks , conducted the research to determine that Kevin Bacon is still more connected than the internet.
Kidding aside, estimates currently place the world’s published website domains at 14 billion pages and climbing.
The research is supported by 19clicks.com , a web content platform that was started in 2005. According to website owner, Samantha Orme:
“When I registered the domain name many moons ago, 19 clicks was the average distance between any two pages on the internet (much like six degrees of separation). I’m assuming in the interim we’ve made it to a bit more than 19 clicks, but I continue to enjoy the concept.”
Barabási’s research, however, suggests that despite massive website publishing increases over the last eight years, the 19 clicks standard still applies.
What is more impressive is that the Smithsonian Institute predicts that their are now more than 1 trillion online documents, yet the same 19-clicks degree of separation.
As Mashable jokes:
“The next time you’re looking at porn, consider the possibility that you’re just a few clicks away from your mother’s Facebook page.”
Do you think every website is still just 19 clicks away from every other publicly displayed website ?
