Research Of Small World Effect In World Wide Web

Complex network is being considered as an important interdisciplinary approach to representing complex systems. Due to its universality and diversity of investigation and research methodologies, it has attracted broad attentions of researchers in different fields, including its topology, statistical properties and mathematical models. The emerging studies toward the small-world and scale-free networks has brought the attention on the complex networks. The small-world networks not only have the same high clustering coefficients as the normal networks, but also the same average path length as the random networks. The degree distribution of scale-free networks presents the power law and has not present the particular scale characteristic. It also can explain the"richer gets richer"phenomenon observed in real-life complex networks. The statistic characteristics of real-life complex networks have already been well observed with the Internet, airport networks and scientific collaboration networks, indication out of which show that they have both small world and scale-free features.The World Wide Web constitutes a massive complex network that far beyond a traditional random network model to describe its structure and behaviors. Recently researchers claim that the sites or the links of web pages exhibit the property of scale-free networks. Another earmark is a small-world phenomenon in the World Wide Web, in which clusters are groupings of Web pages devoted to the same topic and then form scale-free networks.This dissertation first explains typical characteristics of complex networks, describing the classic model of complex networks: random graph model, small-world network model, scale-free network model. By the analyzing the network link status and trends, giving the source codes that parse links from web pages, it conducts the empirical study to World Wide Web. Relevant parameters and factors are established and computed by comparing theory with practice implication. It concludes that the World Wide Web conforms to power law distribution and is scale-free network, it also has the small world effect, which matches the proposed objectives.