The Internet’s Kevin Bacon Game: Most Sites Linked in 19 Clicks

The Web can seem unfathomably vast, but according to a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, it’s more tightly bound than you might think. Most Web pages can be connected in 19 clicks or less, thanks to search engines, large aggregators and social networking sites, according to a paper on network science by Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási. As the Smithsonian magazine reported, these sites act as hubs for the Web at large — or, as Smithsonian’s Joseph Stromberg puts it, the “Kevin Bacons” of the Web. While the vast majority of Web pages have few connections except to pages that have closely related content, the presence of these super sites pulls those disparate groups together. And that number doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon.

Read the full story at the Washington Post.

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