Beautiful internet maps visualize the striking interconnectedness of the web

At Newcastle University in England, a lecturer in architecture has taken to a particularly odd moonlighting job to bolster his pitifully miserly research funding: Making beautiful maps of the internet.

These maps, created by Martin Dade-Robertson, originated as a research project "that sort of went wrong." The research originally intended to explore how various resources on a website or web page are linked together. The end result, though, turned out to be of little scientific use -- but, as luck would have it, incredibly beautiful. In the image above, you see the map for Google (view larger) -- below is the map for Net Park, a UK science and technology park.

Beyond the inherent beauty of the visualizations (there are more below, incidentally), the most interesting thing is just how different some of the maps are. This comes down to how the maps are created. Basically, Dade-Robertson uses some special software (it sounds like a text parser combined with a web crawler) to analyze a single web page. This software scans a web page for the various resources contained therein (text, images, JavaScript), and also for links out to other pages/resources. The links between various elements on a page, and to external resources, are then visualized.

The exact details of how the maps area drawn -- where the dots are placed relative to each other -- is somewhat secret. Dade-Robertson says that pages that are linked together tend to be closer together, with relatively unrelated pages finding their way to the edge of the map. This generally creates a star-like visualization, with a different "core" depending on the website in question. As you can see, Google, which basically just links to other websites, has a very small core; the Net Park map, and the other maps below, show that most websites have a very dense core (i.e. a lot of pages and resources that are cross-linked with each other).

Once the software has drawn the basic map and connected the dots, Dade-Robertson, who lectures for Newcastle University's architecture department, then uses photo editing tools to add color, layers, and special effects (glows and drop shadows, by the looks of it). The end result is undeniably beautiful, but ultimately not very useful because there's simply too much data and too many connections. Perhaps something scientific could be divined if you printed the maps at incredibly high resolution on a huge piece of paper, or produced some vector art that can be infinitely scaled.

If you'd like a map of your favorite website, Dade-Robertson will take commissions(Opens in a new window). There's no word of how much he charges, but he says that any profits he makes will be plowed back into his research at the university.