The Small World Web

It is shown that the World Wide Web is a small world, in the sense that sites are highly clustered yet the path length between them is small and the small-worldness of its search results is used to measure the connectedness between communities on the Web.

Abstract

I show that the World Wide Web is a small world, in the sense that sites are highly clustered yet the path length between them is small. I also demonstrate the advantages of a search engine which makes use of the fact that pages corresponding to a particular search query can form small world networks. In a further application, the search engine uses the small-worldness of its search results to measure the connectedness between communities on the Web.