One of the things I did during my internship at Google this summer was create a visualization of how domains are connected on the internet. I wanted to know which sites my site indirectly linked to, and which sites indirectly linked to my site. There are already quite a few existing visualizations of the internet, but most look like giant amoebas and were difficult to read. I wanted to know about the sites in my domain neighborhood--sites at most 5 links away from my site.

The visualization is a graph where every node represents a site, and an edge between two nodes indicates a link from one site to another. The nodes are laid out as a series of tightly packed rings, withn nojulie.com in the center. All nodes on the first ring are one step away from my domain, all nodes on the second ring are two steps away, and so on. A node�s color indicates its top-level domain, and its size represents how many web pages link to the site. The thickness of an edge represents how many links there are between two domains. In addition to showing you what important sites you link to (or perhaps what important sites link to you), this visualization also illustrates how quickly the internet explodes. For instance, while the number of domains 3 steps away from my site is just 96, this number jumps to 23,436 at 5 steps. Because of Google�s amazing infrastructure, I was able to generate visualizations for many domains in just a few minutes.

Below are a few of the visualizations I created. These images are free for download. If you plan on using this image, please let me know how you are using the image by emailing me at julenka at cmu dot edu.

Domains 3 steps away from notjulie.com. PDF download.	Domains 4 steps away from notjulie.com. PDF download.
Domains that link to notjulie.com up to 4 steps away. PDF download.

Key

Color	Top-Level Domain
	.net, .org
	.com
	.gov
	everything else.