Map of the Internet

Ruslan Enikeev created a searchable Internet map of links and bubbles, showing over 350,000 sites and two million links from 196 countries. Similar sites are closer together.

As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.

Importantly, clusters on the map are semantically charged, i.e. they join websites together according to their content. For example, a vast porno cluster can be seen between Brazil and Japan as well as a host of minor clusters uniting websites of the same field or similar purposes.

Why does porn nestled between Brazil and Japan? I dunno.

I do like how a search for FlowingData shoots you over to a bubble that fills the screen, but then as you zoom out, you see this giant bubble on the top left appear.

Completely dwarfed by Twitter, just a tiny little bit in the big digital sky. Nice.

5 Comments

  • DoD.mil is completely misplaced, it’s beside comcast.net which appears to dwarf it; the problem is that the TLD .mil belongs entirely to DoD and includes nearly all US Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and many other defense websites. They should at least be clustered and should be near .gov Putting major .com sites and second level domains from .mil in comparison does not show the true relationships. All .mil and most .gov sites belong to the US Gov’t and the rest of the .gov’s belong to US state governments.

  • Mansur Aliyu Muhammad July 30, 2012 at 2:41 pm

    This is so good if my country build national website.

  • “Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.[6] According to the IBGE, as of 2000 there were between 1.4 and 1.5 million people of Japanese descent in Brazil.” taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilian

  • hope u don’t mind but i made it my wallpaper.
    with all the icons over my desktop covering all these different sized circals it looks like pure chaos.

    but i like it

  • There is something similar – http://mapternet.com