If You Could See The Internet - Visual Map

by Eli Reyes

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stare at the internet? Of course not, you do it everyday. But we're not talkin' web pages or sites here, we're saying, what if you could look at the internet as a place that could be mapped out? Tron, The Matrix, and the much overlooked 13th Floor all give us a glimpse of life inside a computer. 

We already live much of our lives on the internet, but no one has ever mapped out the internet before. Over at Internet-Map, they did just that, using different sized circles to represent the the traffic of sites and how they relate one another. The result is this Solar System cluster looking thing.

Here's a Google Translated description from Russian (I added some edits to make reading it a little less painful):

Mathematically speaking, the Internet is a two-dimensional map display of links between sites on the Internet. Each site is a circle on the map, [the size of the circle] is determined by the attendance of the site, [the] higher [the] attendance - [the larger the] circle. [Links] between the sites users form a connection, the [more links there are] - the closer sites [are to] one another.

Map of the Internet is a snapshot of the global network at the end of 2011. It covers more than 350 000 sites from 196 countries and all domain zones. Information on over 2 million connections between sites combined them into thematic clusters. As might be expected, the largest clusters are formed by national sites, ie sites belonging to one country. For convenience, the sites related to one country [are] the same color.

They have a search on there, so of course we had to check out where GeekTyrant falls on the map. Without any clue of what algorithm they use, there's no way of really telling how accurate all this is, but it's still a great way to waste time.

 

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