19 degrees of separation: September 13, 1999 issue of New Thinking

September 13, 1999 New Thinking:
19 degrees of separation

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September 13, 1999

19 degrees of separation

By Gerry McGovern

A study conducted at the University of Notre Dame, and just published by Nature magazine, has found that any two pages on the Web are just 19 clicks away from each other. People are hailing this as some sort of breakthrough. That maybe information overload isn’t as bad as we first thought, that maybe the Web isn’t so chaotic after all.

I don’t think so.

Think about it. Any one Web page is ‘only’ 19 clicks away from another. When was the last time you clicked 19 times to get to something you were looking for? 19 is a lot of clicks and that’s assuming you knew where you were going!

Let’s say you are on a journey and you know that to get to your destination you will encounter 19 cross roads. At any one crossroad you will have four choices. Keep going straight, go left, go right, go back, because you took the wrong turn at the previous crossroads. That’s a lot of choices.

Have you ever come to a crossroads that had no signs? Or have you ever come to a crossroads where the sign did not list the destination you were heading to, whereas the previous crossroads that pointed you towards this crossroads did indeed list that destination? Both occurrences have happened to me on occasion. Very frustrating. Even with everything perfectly signed, 19 crossroads means making a lot of decisions and traveling a lot of miles.

If you think the signs on our roads can be bad, then the signs on the Web are appalling. At least when you’re in Finland, for example, all signs have the same design; the same color coding, the same font.

I drove a lot in Finland during the summer and got used to the signs (after first getting used to the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road). After driving a couple of thousand kilometers (and my family and myself constantly calculating just how many miles we had driven), I came across a new type of coloring. I got immediately nervous. It wasn’t a motorway, so what was it? The towns listed were still the same, but I began to feel that something must be wrong.

Then I figured that the change in color signified that we were driving on a road that while still single lane, was considerably wider than the previous roads I had gotten used to. I relaxed again.

On the Web every time you move from one website to another you change color, you change font, you change linking structures, you change everything. Being told that you are only 19 clicks away from your destination is like being told that you are 19 turns away from finding that needle in the haystack! You need a map and that’s why you go to Yahoo.

But Yahoo is a strange map. According to recent studies, Yahoo maps no more than 7 percent of the Internet, with the most comprehensive search engine mapping no more than 16 percent. That's like giving someone a map of a country with only the major cities and towns and major roads on it.

You know the film Six Degrees of Separation, where it is postulated that any one person is only six acquaintances away from anyone else on this 6 billion person planet. That’s kind of comforting. Maybe that’s not in reality true but being informed that I’m only 19 clicks away from the information I need is one cold comfort.

Gerry McGovern

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Being told that you are only 19 clicks away from your destination is like being told that you are 19 turns away from finding that needle in the haystack!