Mapping the web

A Russian coder by the name Ruslan Enikeev has created something extraordinary: The Map of the Internet. The map depicts a network based on traffic, with each dot representing a website, and each switch a link. The stronger the link (the more often people went from one site to the other) the closer they become on the map. The bi-dimensional scheme gathers information from over 350 million sites from 196 countries, and also works with a color scheme: sites relative to a country are painted the same, Russia is red, China is yellow, Japan is purple, and North-America is light blue. For the curious geeks physical and quantum-physical examples are drawn, and a mathematical analogy is also accessible to help with understanding the method. Different clusters are arranged according to their content. The network is based on data until the end of 2011. The purpose of the project was „an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.”

The Hungarian segment shows that the most visited site up until 2011 included Google, the news portal Index, the blogging site blog.hu, origo, and Iwiw, the social networking engine that ruled the market before Facebook became popular. Other circles indicate frequent switches between university sites and funny blogs like sg or demotiváló, Imdb is the biggest foreign blog, Hungarians visited last year.

The project came to life with the help of Google Maps API and russian creative agency Positive Communications and claims to have no financial purpose but entertainment.            
The application operates under the following address.