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Searching problems
[A deep and uncharted web]    [The web is a quicksand]
[Other searching techniques]    [Psychological and visual aspects]    [How to proceed]


A deep and uncharted web

The web is huge, of course, but that's not the only problem. Time and space have a different meaning on the web. Try to pull something off the web and you wont be able to do it. Everything you write and publish will defy eternity: the very moment you put something on the web, someone, somewhere, will make a copy out of it. It is bound to reappear: indistructible.

Mid March 2001 there should be around 3,5 milliard pages on the web, according to most (self-calling) experts. How many they really are is anybody guess. Fact is that the main search engines (in this very moment, on a continuously moving landscape, Google, Fast, Webtop, Hotbot and Lykos) cover at best one third of it, probably far less. Search engines are not enough (by a long shot not enough) in order to search this huge bulk of scattered information, therefore different methods MUST be used to search the web.

Mid March 2001 the diameter of the web should be around 19 clicks. Since the average number of links per page is seven (even if on many sites you'll find hundreds of links), given the (presumed) dimensions of the web you can hop from any Internet site to any other one (yep!) using on average just 19 clicks. This limit will not increase much with the growth of the web (there's a logarithmical correlation) and may increase to a maximum of 21 or 22 links MAX (on average). This said the real chances that you can reach at all (not on average) from any random site any other random site CLICKING ONLY FOWARD are just around 25%.

The structure of the web, from a searcher's point of view, is - to say the least- pretty weird.

Yet the structure of the web is of paramount importance (from a searcher's standpoint) in order to decide which techniques you should apply when searching and where. Let's start with the 'Nucleus'. Imagine a huge bulk of nearly 3,5 milliard pages, all mutually interconnected. This is the CORE of the web, strongly interconnetted pages, sites, usenet newsgroups, messageboards, you name it. This is the 'web' as you know it, where you happily browse from link to link smearing all your personal data along, as we'll see later, when we'll examine some anonymity themes. It is not easy to represent the web threedimensionally. The Nucleus is far from being a compact and uniform 'ball' of mutually interconnetted sites, you should think at a fractal like entity, with almost 'organic' features, with spaghetti-similar 'tubes' that quickly connect some areas while leaving 'link-holes' in many places, it would probably look like a chump of Gruyère :-)

Here you have an image I have made myself, that could be of some help...

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Petit image

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