But Dodge and his professors at the university's Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis are developing ways to dynamically trace the connections between various IP addresses through Web links. With help from the search engine AltaVista, Dodge has traced the shared Web links between 120 universities in the United Kingdom. By mapping the number of links and where those universities are located in the real world, he hopes to find ways to make the actual physical connections between those universities more efficient. Information Is Alive Other technologists are applying the principles of ecology to the growth of the Internet. Bernardo Huberman and Lada A. Adamic, researchers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, have discovered that the seemingly chaotic growth of the Internet isn't so chaotic after all.
Some Web sites have thousands or even millions of pages of information, while others have only one.
Nevertheless, Huberman and Adamic, in an article published last Thursday in the journal Science, say that they average out in the end. The majority of cyberspace addresses contain only a handful of pages. For search engines, that could mean better cataloging and more detailed access to the Web. Sure, the average income of the village goes up, but most everyone else remains poor. Once you find the billionaire, you can be more certain that everyone else's income is far lower.