Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:50:24 GMT

Power Laws, Political Websites, and Inequality. “Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web” (pdf, 300k), by Matthew Hindman and two co-authors from NEC labs, is an examination of the link structure of some 3 million politically-oriented websites.

The authors draw observations similar to those in the Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality piece: For each of the issues examined, most of the links are to sites in the top 20; and the median site gets a single inbound link. The power law still holds at lower resolution, when communities of discourse are split into subcommunities.

The bottom line: we should be careful not to confuse retrievability with visibility.

While I found the article a little verbose, there are interesting tidbits throughout – and a nice list of references.

(Thanks, Kushal!)
[Corante: Social Software]

This is a interesting bit of research, but I wonder whether this is because of the method google uses to rank sites?