Jelle Druyts

I saw a movie once (conveniently titled "Six Degrees Of Separation") based on the theory with the same name that every single person on our little ecosystem is only six steps (family, friends, acquaintances, a homely sheep) away from anybody else. So I was wondering, with all this Google Power we have nowadays - what's the magic number for the web? How many hops in Google's database would it be between any two pages? Apparently, a smart guy at Cornell University determined that every webpage is 16 to 20 clicks away from any other webpage.

The weird thing is, I assume there must be a lot more webpages than human beings by now, so how come this is about three times as much? On average you might argue (at least I hope so for you) you have more friends than there are links on a webpage ("outbound connection cardinality" so to speak, random expensive word of the day) but what about indexes, blogs, favorites and such that are packed with links? Cornell-dude? You up?

Although for blogs I guess the magic number will be a lot lower, bloggers tend to have pretty tight social networks right? So would that be 6 again or more? Or maybe even less? Maybe Feedster's database could answer that...