The Web is literally growing like a weed.
Nobody knows why.
The original six degrees notion, based on a sociological theory popularized in the 1960s, posits that each person on the planet is linked to any other person through no more than five mutual acquaintances. But others don't think trying to quantify the Web will amount to much of anything useful. Basically, they found the Web is a lot like a living plant. Another team of researchers, Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, found the same growth pattern on the Web through a different method of analysis. Still, as Barabasi and his students showed, efforts aimed at quantifying the Web can aid in the effort to better understand its structure.