We stumbled onto something cool today. What you’re seeing on the picture above is a snapshot of how huge the internet currently is, and how each website in existence is dependent on each other. From what we can tell, this particular map was created by Positive Communications, a Russian tech firm. The firm has provided documentation on what data they used to construct this map, unfortunately it’s all in Russian, but Reddit user weasel707 has provided a neat translation of the text:
“The Internet Map is a snapshot of the global network in its state at the end of 2011. It captures more than 350,000 sites from 196 countries. Information regarding over 2 million connections between sites unites them into thematic clusters. As expected, the largest clusters are formed from national sites, i.e. sites belonging to one particular country. For convenience, sites corresponding to a given country are shown in the same colour. For example, the red area is Russia, Yellow is Chinese, Violet is Japan, the large light-blue central area is American, and so on.
It’s important to note that clusters have a semantic relationship, i.e. they are united or grouped by their content. For example, one can see an extensive cluster of porno-sites between Japan and Brazil, as well as many small clusters uniting sites of one industry or field.”
For those itching to try it out, the bar on the upper left is a search bar where you can look for a specific site. As expected, Google, Facebook and YouTube are all massive sites and dominate the map. And for those who are wondering, yes, Reddit is far bigger than 9Gag.
Source: internet-map.net via Reddit