Someone Went And Mapped The Entire Internet As Its Own Interactive Universe And It’s Fantastic

The Internet — that noble series of tubes — is quite large. It is also not a physical thing, in the sense that Google is not a place. These two facts, one would think, would combine to ensure that one could not map the Internet.

None of which has stopped some mad genius from mapping the fucking Internet.

Said mad genius behind it explains it thusly:

“The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.

The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.”

Which is super cool and all but the

Here’s Facebook, looming over everything like the omnipotent God-King it is:

And here’s Google, looking like the Death Star:

Here, by contrast, is ol’ mate MySpace, bravely battling it out for size supremacy with Google Netherlands:

I like how they form little clusters of like-minded websites. They’re like tiny solar systems only on the CyberWebs. Here’s the Procrastination System:

While over here we have the Buy Dumb Stuff On Impulse Nebula:

There’s even a teeny-tiny cluster of Australian news websites, probably having snarky little wars with each other that none of the bigger planets notice:

To put that last picture in perspective, here it is in relation to the whole thing:

It’s official: on the Internet you are less than a speck of dust, a mote of nothing floating in an endlessly vast void populated by presences greater than you could ever conceive of. Just like in real life!

Go play with the map and ponder your own fundamental insignificance here.