A Simulation of the Structure of the World-Wide Web

In this paper we are presenting a simple simulation of the Internet World-WideWeb, where one observes the appearance of web pages belonging to different websites, covering a number of different thematic topics and possessing links toother web pages. The goal of our simulation is to reproduce the form of theobserved World-Wide Web and of its growth, using a small number of simpleassumptions. In our simulation, existing web pages may generate new ones asfollows: First, each web page is equipped with a topic concerning its contents.Second, links between web pages are established according to common topics.Next, new web pages may be randomly generated and subsequently they might beequipped with a topic and be assigned to web sites. By repeated iterations ofthese rules, our simulation appears to exhibit the observed structure of theWorld-Wide Web and, in particular, a power law type of growth. In order tovisualise the network of web pages, we have followed N. Gilbert's (1997)methodology of scientometric simulation, assuming that web pages can berepresented by points in the plane. Furthermore, the simulated graph is found topossess the property of small worlds, as it is the case with a large number ofother complex networks.