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To: Mohan Marette who wrote (133768)	6/22/1999 6:13:00 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 176387

FYI...<<On the Web, as Elsewhere, Popularity Is Self-Reinforcing By JOHN MARKOFF (6/21/99) SAN FRANCISCO -- On the World Wide Web, the rich are getting richer. Bringing new statistical support to an increasingly common Internet wisdom, two Xerox Corp. researchers have found that the most popular Web sites command by far the biggest share of Internet traffic -- a signature of what economists refer to as "winner take all" markets. -Darcy Padilla for The New York Times The researchers Bernardo Huberman, right, and Lada Adamic found evidence that a relative handful of sites command a large proportion of traffic on the Web. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The study, which is based on statistical measurements of visitors to sites on the Internet's World Wide Web, looks at a large data sample of Internet traffic to two types of sites: universities and so-called adult entertainment. The findings, which are laid out in a report that is to be presented at a technical conference this month by Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman, would seem to undermine arguments by some entrepreneurs and technologists that the World Wide Web would be a democratizing force, allowing a large number of relatively equal market contestants to compete on a level playing field. Instead, the study finds, the most popular sites tend to gain an accelerating advantage over their competitors. "Basically, we found that you are rewarded not so much for absolute performance as much as for relative performance," said Huberman, a physicist who studies the ecology of computer networks at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. The Xerox study is based on a sample of America Online users in December 1997. The data look at 60,000 users and 120,000 Web sites. Whether analyzing traffic to university sites or to the sex-oriented adult entertainment sites, the research indicates that the traffic distribution follows what is known as a universal power law. This means that a small number of sites command the traffic of a large portion of the entire Web population. Huberman said the pattern found in the America Online data was reflected in the researchers' subsequent analysis of data from the Web "portal" Yahoo. The America Online user data indicated that among all sites visited -- excluding America Online as a site itself -- 119 sites received 32.36 percent of all visits, with Yahoo receiving the most. The top 5 percent of all sites in the sample -- approximately 6,000 sites -- received 74.81 percent of all Web traffic. The top 5 percent of adult sites received 41.75 percent of total visitors to such sites. And the top 5 percent of educational sites received 59.5 percent of all visitors to that category of sites. The finding that Web visitors are distributed among sites according to the universal power law mirrors what social scientists refer to as Pareto's Law -- named for a late 19th-century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who studied different countries and found the statistics of inequality in the distribution of wealth showed a remarkable similarity. "The most popular sites are generally not the ones that were created first," Huberman said. Popularity instead tended to be determined by a collective process he referred to as social search, in which referrals from friends and acquaintances drove growth. The Xerox findings are closely correlated with the yet-to-be-released results of similar research conducted by a group of IBM researchers at the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. As part of a broader study undertaken in an effort to improve the quality of a Web searching tool, a group of five scientists graphed the hyperlinks, or pointers, between different Web sites. Pointers that refer to other Web sites are another measure of popularity on the Web. "Their research is very similar to our research," said Sridhar Rajagopalan, a member of the IBM research staff at the Almaden center, referring to the Xerox team's efforts. Both teams of researchers said their findings could not be used to predict winners and losers on the Web -- but did show that once a Web site catches on, its popularity tends to increase rapidly. "This doesn't say it will be hopeless for a small mom-and-pop Web site," Rajagopalan said. "It's more like a lottery.">> Regards, Scott