Study Reveals Web Sites are Only 19 Mouse Clicks Apart

Posted by accountingweb on Sep 10 1999 161 printer friendly

The medium is the message, and interconnectivity is key to the technology. A study released Thursday in Nature says any two randomly selected pages on the Internet are only 19 mouse clicks apart from one another.

The study was led by physics professor Albert-Laszlo Barbasi at the University of Notre Dame, who, along with his team, had a robot collect and follow all links found on one Web page. The process was repeated until the team could determine a statistical link between two pages.

The reason for the study was primarily to benefit search engines, who can now create programs using the statistics to determine the information available via the Web. It is estimated that any of the search engines only retrieve about 34 percent of the information available over the Internet.

Voice of the Editor

Even though any accounting auditor would tell you it seems like there are an awful lot of tax accountants out there, surely one-third of the country isn't made up of tax preparers, so it's rather startling news to learn that one-third of Americans like to do their taxes. Who knew?

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