Half the web is dead

A Story from The BBC reports a new study done by IBM, Compaq and Altavista, estimates that only 30% of all web pages make up a heavily interconnected core which most of the search engines index. They dubbed the core the \’giant strongly connected component\’.

They say that it can take hundreds of clicks to reach some web pages and others cannot be reached at all.
Of course this contradicts work carried out by Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi from the University of Notre Dame that suggested it took a maximum of 19 clicks to get from one side of the web to the other. You can check out the study Here. They call it the \”Bow Tie\” Theory.
\”The result is the development of the \”Bow Tie\” Theory. One of the initial discoveries of this ongoing study shatters the number one myth about the Web … in truth, the Web is less connected than previously thought. \”

A Story from The BBC reports a new study done by IBM, Compaq and Altavista, estimates that only 30% of all web pages make up a heavily interconnected core which most of the search engines index. They dubbed the core the \’giant strongly connected component\’.

They say that it can take hundreds of clicks to reach some web pages and others cannot be reached at all.
Of course this contradicts work carried out by Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi from the University of Notre Dame that suggested it took a maximum of 19 clicks to get from one side of the web to the other. You can check out the study Here. They call it the \”Bow Tie\” Theory.
\”The result is the development of the \”Bow Tie\” Theory. One of the initial discoveries of this ongoing study shatters the number one myth about the Web … in truth, the Web is less connected than previously thought. \”Beyond this core are websites that are increasingly isolated. The researchers, led by Ravi Kumar from the IBM Almaden laboratory, found that 24% of websites have links that lead towards the core.


A further 24% are destination pages that can be reached by following links out of the core pages. The final 22% are utterly isolated from the core or self-contained islands between friends or special interest groups. This means that 46% of web pages go nowhere.


The results are backed up by the work that web search company Inktomi has done on indexing the links between pages. Inktomi has indexed around 1.4 billion web pages to get a better idea of which pages come up as a result of a web search.


\”About 30% of the 1.4 billion unique documents on the web are rubbish or computer generated and stuff that people are not interested in,\” said Joe Frost, marketing director at Inktomi.