Hamburg 2001 – scientific programme

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DY: Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 46: Poster

DY 46.82: Poster

Thursday, March 29, 2001, 15:45–18:15, Foyer S\ 3

World Wide Web Scaling Exponent from Simon’s 1955 Model — •Holger Ebel and Stefan Bornholdt — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Kiel, Leibnizstraße 15, 24098 Kiel, Germany

Recently, statistical properties of the World Wide Web have attracted considerable attention when self-similar regimes have been observed in the scaling of its link structure. A characteristic quantity is the number of links k that point to a particular web page. Its probability distribution P(k) shows a pronounced power-law scaling P(k) ∼ k^−γ that is not readily explained by standard random graph theory. Here, we recall a simple and elegant model for scaling in general copy and growth processes proposed by Simon in 1955 [1] which is based on constant network growth and preferential linking of nodes with high connectivity [2]. When applied to the World Wide Web, this classical model predicts the scaling exponent from experimental data to γ=2.1 in accordance with observation.

[1] H. Simon, Biometrika 42, 425 (1955)

[2] H. Ebel and S. Bornholdt, cond-mat/0008465 (2000)