
The Internet Map - m0th87
http://internet-map.net/
======
revelation
That is not the Internet, its the Web. I'm all for telling non-technical
people that the internet ends with the Web, save we get politicians wanting to
regulate TCP ports or establish police server patrols.

A map of the internet would probably show AS and peerings between them.

------
cpr
This is the Internet map a few months after I first got on from Harv-10 in
1972:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/7257339850/lightbox/> .

Brings back great memories of sitting by the Harvard IMP (router) late at
night, and getting a call from BBN on the phone asking me (anyone) to reboot
it manually...

~~~
guard-of-terra
By the way, I (as non-US) wonder why west coast and california had more nodes
even back then?

I mean, west coast is less populated and if you look at night lights map it's
practically invisible compared to east coast. Why tech tend to be there
anyway?

~~~
bherms
Back then it was likely easier to lay the groundwork than in more populated
cities. In addition there were great institutes of higher learning focusing on
technology.

Note this is just a small theory and in no way has any evidence to back it.

~~~
guard-of-terra
But then, why all those technology institutes happened to grow there? Back
when there weren't many people, or infrastructure, or tech?

~~~
eclipxe
"Back when there weren't many people, or infrastructure"

What time frame are you thinking of here? I'm not sure it is accurate - there
was plenty of infrastructure and people in post WW2 Western US.

~~~
guard-of-terra
When those technological institutions were found.

Maybe there were plenty, still I guess east coast had much more. Am I wrong?

~~~
sbov
You'd probably have to go to before WW2.

On the earlier end, Stanford, UCLA, UCSB and Berkeley all trace their roots
back to 1860s-1890s.

But you'd probably have to go back to before the gold rush to go to a time
when there weren't many people in the bay area: san francisco had about 1,000
people living there in 1848, 25,000 by 1849, and was the 10th most populous
city in the US by 1870, and had 300,000 by 1890.

Los Angeles blew up with the discovery of oil and entertainment and broke the
top 10 in the 20's and the top 5 in the 30's.

You aren't wrong, the east coast had a lot more people, but they still do
today.

------
mashmac2
I'd love to see a how this was made blog article... especially how all of the
data was found/processed.

~~~
dvanduzer
The about page has a fair amount of detail, but a rough outline:

Basically, they took a web crawler like Heritrix (archive.org) or Scrapy (a
handy Python implementation good for prototyping) and just started fetching
web pages.

Eventually, they have a database of 350,000 websites, along with two million
links between these domains. Any set of web pages within a given domain may
have hundreds of hyperlinks to a dozen other domains, but a link from any page
in one domain to any page in another domain becomes a relationship between two
domain nodes in a graph. Presumably they used something like neo4j.org to
store these relationships (cf. jokes about relational databases being bad at
storing relationship information).

Then the actual hard part comes in. They link to a high level paper on
rendering a visualization of that much information, and then used a similar
algorithm to determine placement of each node. The size of each node is
presumably the number of links in/out and the color coding is geographic (and
probably not considered in this algorithm).

So now they have a database describing all these nodes and relationships, and
an algorithm to draw a gigantic image of all of them in 2D space. They used
GPU-based parallel processing techniques (probably with NVidia's CUDA
language) to crunch all the numbers to generate the final image.

Finally, the image ends up being pretty large at a reasonable zoom. A scaled
map of the Earth zoomed a bit above street level would still be about 125
miles on a side. So they use Google Maps API to manage small chunks of the
image at various zoom levels. (They also end up rerunning that algorithm a few
times to generate smaller images for each zoom step, including one at good old
1024x768).

Pretty neat. Would love to see their writeup.

~~~
nzmsv
According to this: <http://habrahabr.ru/post/148351/> they are just using data
from Alexa and visualizing it.

------
ComputerGuru
What is it visualizing? Pages or links? Because if it's links, there's no way
that Facebook is so large and Wikipedia is so small.

~~~
delinka
According to other comments on HN, it seems they are counting outside links to
a given domain.

~~~
ComputerGuru
That's what I'm saying, it's just not possible. Pageviews would explain
Facebook being so much larger than Wikipedia, but think about it - how many
links from outside Facebook point to Facebook vs how many links from outside
Wikipedia point to Wikipedia?

~~~
SonicSoul
what about all the Facebook embedded widgets? wouldn't those be links to
facebook.com ?

~~~
brianfryer
Not necessarily. Most of those things are iframes, so technically it's FB
linking back to FB.

------
kkelly
A couple of these are very strange. Instagram is right beside yousendit as
well as almost every Irish web property. Still an awesome visualization, but
what is it visualizing?

------
sudhirj
This is actually a very useful advertising tool - if you're considering
placing ads on any sites, it's a great way to see how they compare to other
sites in terms of traffic and visitor flow.

~~~
lhtbws
Agreed, but it's also funny to find inexplicable little outliers in the graph.
Amishamerica.com, for instance, seems to be nestled right in the middle of the
pornoverse ([http://internet-
map.net/#12-157.30947875976562-183.961929321...](http://internet-
map.net/#12-157.30947875976562-183.96192932128906)).

------
ansgri
Apparently it uses Google Maps for display, and I wonder, does GMaps API allow
use of custom map data, or does it mean that this visualization is made by
Google?

~~~
Stratoscope
The Maps API works with all sorts of custom map types [1]. You can augment or
replace the standard Google map tiles.

This map uses a google.maps.ImageMapType [2] along with a custom
EuclideanProjection map projection [3] which replaces the standard spherical
Mercator ("Google Mercator") projection.

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#CustomMapTypes)

[2]
[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#ImageMapTypes)

[3] View source of <http://internet-map.net/>

~~~
ansgri
Thank you for the detailed reply. I definitely agree with [3], and wouldn't
ask if I've had enough experience with modern web technologies.

------
snambi
Some questions: [1] nice to have some details about the site when clicking on
them. [2] Is there any meaning to the color? if so, what are they?

~~~
Wilya
Color is country, it's written somewhere in the about page. Russia is red,
China is yellow-ish, etc.

------
hhw
Here is a physical map of the Internet: <http://www.cablemap.info/>

And here is a logical map of the Internet: <http://www.peer1.com/map-of-the-
internet>

A map of websites doesn't really make that much sense as a website can easily
be in multiple places

~~~
dkd
Thanks so much cablemap.info site.

------
Trufa
I can't reddit is this[1] small!

Also you are here[2].

[1]: <http://i.imgur.com/impUR.jpg> [2]: <http://i.imgur.com/7WKaF.jpg>

------
alanfang
Interesting what's next to ycombinator [http://internet-
map.net/#8-141.12828063964844-82.50301361083...](http://internet-
map.net/#8-141.12828063964844-82.50301361083984)

------
pixie_
Very awesome, it's cool how each color is a different country and you can see
where countries integrate with other countries and where they clump together
on their own.

------
Wilya
It's a bit strange to see wordpress.com alone in the top left of the map.

~~~
littlemerman
Agreed. Maybe an abnormality?

------
SonicSoul
extra points for really tidy and readable JS and markup

