The Web's hidden order
Lada A. Adamic, Bernardo A. Huberman · Communications of the ACM · 2001
This article focuses on the Web. The past decade has seen the birth and explosive growth of Web in terms of content and user population. There has been exponential growth of the number of Web servers, the number of users online has grown exponentially as well. Whereas, in 1996 there were 61 million Internet users worldwide, at the end of 1998, more than 147 million people were Internet users worldwide and in 2000, the number of users more than doubled again to 400 million. With its remarkable growth, the Web has popularized e-commerce and as a result an increasing segment of world's population conducts commercial transactions online. From its onset in 1991, the Web has demonstrated notable variety in the size of its features, including connectivity and content. Surprisingly, it has been found that there is order to the apparent arbitrariness of the increasing amount of Web content and its user population. One especially notable pattern observed is that there are many small elements within the Web but few large ones.