You Can Get From This Page to Any Other in 19 Clicks

This week's coolest tech nugget: Though recent estimates peg the number of webpages in existence at a staggering 14 billion, a Hungarian physicist says we can get from any one page to any other in 19 clicks or less. Yes, it's the Kevin Bacon-ification of the Internet. To get at his 19 degrees of separation, Albert-László Barabási used a simulated model of the Web that revealed the following: Those 14 billion pages spawn what Smithsonian refers to as 1 trillion "web documents"—the pages themselves, photos, video, etc.

Most of those can claim just a few connections, but a small number of them (including aggregators like, perhaps, Newser) are super connectors that allow you to easily move from one part of the Web to another—in 19 clicks or less. Neat nugget within the nugget: Barabási found that it doesn't matter if the Web grows much larger, or were to become much smaller, the number doesn't budge. It's still 19 clicks or less. He says this does have some cybersecurity implications, though he notes that the all-important connectors are among the more protected parts of the Web. (More Kevin Bacon stories.)