AP News, October 10th, 2007
It took two months and nearly 3 billion electronic probes for researchers to create a map of the Internet. Now comes the task of making sense of their data _ and figuring out what they missed.
The Internet census comes from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif.
Over two months, ISI computers sent queries to about 2.8 billion numeric "Internet Protocol," or IP, addresses that identify individual computers on the Internet. (The domain names familiar to most people are converted into these numeric addresses behind the scenes.)
Replies came from about 187 million of the IP addresses, and researchers used that data to map out where computers exist on the Internet. At one dot per address using a typical printer, the resulting map was about 9 feet by 9 feet. The top finally was taped onto the 8-foot-high ceiling.
A condensed version squeezes about 65,000 addresses into a dot, with brighter colors used to show ranges of numbers where a greater number of computers exist.
John Heidemann, a senior project leader at ISI, acknowledges the map shows only a portion of the Internet. For one thing, computers may have been turned off when the probe checked their addresses. Or they were located behind a firewall, or grouped in a way that several shared a single address.
Even so, the results are useful, Heidemann said. They help show how densely populated the Internet is, and they could help security researchers study the spread of computer viruses. And similar censuses over time could help track the Internet's growth.
"There are a lot of questions," Heidemann said. "Our data isn't definitive, but it's data that didn't exist before. It starts to shed some light about how (the Internet is) currently being used."
http://www.isi.edu/ant/address
