If you're ever feeling lost in the vacuum of cyber space, don't despair. The web is woven tighter than you might expect — in fact, you're probably just a few clicks away from your homepage.
Apparently, no two pages on the web are separated by more than 19 clicks. That's according to research recently published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
The researcher, Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási, is something of an expert on network theory. He authored a book called Linked: The New Science of Networks, which was published in 2002.
Still, the web's 19 clicks of separation may seem unimpressive since Kevin Bacon is supposedly connected to every actor or actress by six or fewer links.
Well, current estimates put the number of existing webpages at more than 14 billion — that's more than two for each person on the planet.
Although the research on 19 clicks had been making the rounds online Monday, it may not be as big a revelation as we think. The webpage 19clicks.com has content from as early as 2005.
Blogger Samantha Orme wrote, "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."
But Orme may be mistaken. According to Barabási's research, even as the web continues to grow, the 19 clicks rule will likely endure.
A Smithsonian report on the study said, "Barabási analyzed the network looking at a variety of levels — examining anywhere from a tiny slice to the full 1 trillion documents — and found that regardless of scale, the same 19-click-or-less rule applied."
In conclusion, 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.
Image courtesy of Flickr, sjcockell
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