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Diameter of the World-Wide Web

Open access
Albert, Réka, Jeong, Hawoong, Barabási, Albert-László·1999·Nature

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 documents) and the continual changing of documents and links make it impossible to catalogue all the vertices and edges.

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Metadata

Authors
Albert, R., Jeong, H., & Barabási, A.-L.
Venue
Nature
Published
1999-09
Volume
401
Issue
6749
Pages
130-131
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
OpenAlex
W2769133055
Cited by
4,260
References
0
FWCI
70.42
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Diameter of the World-Wide Web. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/43601
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Albert, R., Jeong, H., & Barabási, A.-L. (1999). Diameter of the World-Wide Web. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/43601

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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.