AltaVista, IBM, and Compaq have released a collaborative paper on the graphical structure of the Web, based on the results of two exhaustive crawls of over 200 million pages and 1.5 billion links using AltaVista. Their findings suggest the Web may not be as interconnected as we thought? The intricate diagram of the Web produced by the results, shows that there are large sections of the Web that can not be reached purely by links, depending on where you started. In fact, the graph looks not unlike a giant bow tie with pieces of spaghetti hanging off it. So there.The companies say this new vision of the Web could help us to understand further the ?sociology of content creation? on the Web. It also holds implications, of course, for navigation, searching and linking. We at Ninfo aren?t too hot on our graph theory, so it might be wise to take a primer before you drop by ? unless you?re just going to look at the pictures? Report: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/k53/www9.final/

Graph primer: http://www1.compaq.com/pressrelease/0,1494,wp%7E14583_2%21ob%7E29892_1_1,00.html