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Introduction
e Web is already so much a part of our lives that familiarity has clouded our per-
ception of the Web itself.
SIR TIM BERNERSLEE
Inventor of the World Wide Web (1999, 2)
e Web is an articial creation a technical infrastructure, a network of documents cre-
ated bit by bit, link by link by millions of people. Being able to visualize this infrastructure
is big business and companies such as Microso and Bell Labs have created enormous,
coloured topological maps, not unlike the star charts that astronomers use to depict dis-
tant galaxies.
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Plotting the distribution of the millions of hypertext links that constitute the
network p ...