[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[wren ng thornton]

Johan Tibell wrote:
> To my knowledge the data we have about prevalence of encoding on the web is
> accurate. We crawl all pages we can get our hands on, by starting at some
> set of seeds and then following all the links. You cannot be sure that
> you've reached all web sites as there might be cliques in the web graph but
> we try our best to get them all. You're unlikely to get a better estimate
> anywhere else. I doubt few organizations have the machinery required to
> crawl most of the web.

There was a study recently on this. They found that there are four main 
parts of the Internet:

* a densely connected core, where from any site you can get to any other
* an "in cone", from which you can reach the core (but not other in-cone 
members, since then you'd both be in the core)
* an "out cone", which can be reached from the core (but which cannot 
reach each other)
* and, unconnected islands

The surprising part is they found that all four parts are approximately 
the same size. I forget the exact numbers, but they're all 25+/-5%.

This implies that an exhaustive crawl of the web would require having 
about 50% of all websites as seeds (the in-cone plus the islands). If 
we're only interested in a representative sample, then we could get by 
with fewer. However, that depends a lot on the definition of 
"representative". And we can't have an accurate definition of 
representative without doing the entire crawl at some point in order to 
discover the appropriate distributions. Then again, distributions change 
over time...

Thus, I would guess that Google only has 50~75% of the net: the core, 
the out-cone, and a fraction of the islands and in-cone.

-- 
Live well,
~wren