Abstract
Despite its increasing role in communication, the World-Wide Web remains uncontrolled: any individual or institution can create a website with any number of documents and links. This unregulated growth leads to a huge and complex web, which becomes a large directed graph whose vertices are documents and whose edges are links (URLs) that point from one document to another. The topology of this graph determines the web's connectivity and consequently how effectively we can locate information on it. But its enormous size (estimated to be at least 8×108 documents1) and the continual changing of documents and links make it impossible to catalogue all the vertices and edges.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Lawrence, S. & Giles, C. L. Nature 400, 107–109 (1999).
Claffy, K., Monk, T. E. & McRobb D. Internet tomography. Nature [online] 〈http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/tomog/tomog.html〉 (1999).
Erdös, P. & Rényi, A. Publ. Math. Inst. Hung. Acad. Sci. 5, 17–61 (1960).
Bollobás, B. Random Graphs (Academic, London, 1985).
Watts, D. J. & Strogatz, S. H. Nature 393, 440–442 (1998).
Bunde, A. & Havlin, S. Fractals in Science (Springer, Berlin, 1994).
Barthélémy, M. & Amaral, L. A. N. Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 3180–3183 (1999).
Barabási, A.-L., Albert, R. & Jeong, H. 〈http://www.nd.edu/~networks〉.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Albert, R., Jeong, H. & Barabási, AL. Diameter of the World-Wide Web. Nature 401, 130–131 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/43601
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/43601
This article is cited by
-
Accelerating directed densest subgraph queries with software and hardware approaches
The VLDB Journal (2024)
-
Kalman filtering for linear singular systems subject to round-robin protocol
Control Theory and Technology (2024)
-
Avalanche-size distribution of Cayley tree
Scientific Reports (2023)
-
Communities in C. elegans connectome through the prism of non-backtracking walks
Scientific Reports (2023)
-
Habit formation viewed as structural change in the behavioral network
Communications Biology (2023)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.