Google Browser Shows Your Links In Motion
by Bill Koelzer
Your site is enmeshed in a monstrously large matrix of linked website connections. Seeing this matrix wriggling around on a screen, as though alive, is really scary the first time. Here's how you view it.
Since there is so much talk lately about how links -- both incoming and outgoing -- impact our sites' ability to rise up higher on Google and most other search engines, I thought it would be good to acquaint you with the little known TouchGraph Google Browser.
This incredible tool will actually show you for the first time graphically how your own website is enmeshed in an inconceivably huge matrix of Web relationships. The TouchGraph Google Browser, which requires Java JRE 1.3+ (available at the site), shows you the thousands of lines that exist between your site and the sites that it's linked to, and even the sites beyond.
The full screen graphic you view looks almost alive. In fact, it's really scary the first time you see it moving and wriggling around on the screen like something quite alive.
Apocryphally, it almost makes you think that we may not be far from the Internet becoming self-aware as the rogue computer, HAL, did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the callow military computer did in 1983's War Games starring Matthew Broderick, or the computer network SkyNet did in all of the Terminator movies.
In the TouchGraph Browser, if you double-click on the little boxes that carry the first level of key sites that are connected to your site, each box magically expands with lines shooting out in all directions to show you the next level of boxes/sites to which the first-level box connects. And on and on and on that way. (The connected boxes are like those of an organizational chart, showing who reports to whom, horizontally, vertically and laterally.) Double-clicking on a box opens dozens of secondary boxes. You will tire of clicking on boxes long before you reach the end of their relationship. Actually, no end to the relationship exists!
As you click on more boxes and go deeper and deeper into the matrix, with the screen showing more and more lines to other connections, you realize -- because perhaps this is the first time that you could actually SEE it -- how truly intertwined your linking has become on the Web.
You will see how your link to a single large "authority" site, or that of another agent, is only the tip of the iceberg of interconnectivity that your site enjoys on the Web because of just that one link.
If you doubleclick on the box that represents the site that a given link goes to, then that site's outgoing links will unfold and appear for you.
Here's an exercise for you. Open the visualizer to a big Realtor site like www.NeoRealestate.com, or to www.DebbieFerrari.com. Then go to several big realty "hubs" like Realty Times and drill down through the many interconnected boxes. Soon, your screen becomes so filled with lines and boxes that you can only study an inch or so of the space at a time. It is like looking at the stars on a clear night through a telescope and realizing that in an area just the size of a dime there are thousands of stars.
The way, way out, farthermost boxes in the Visualizer (farthest away from your own site) also represent websites connected to yours, but they may not even have your link on them. Nonetheless, they are connected, through the matrix, to your site because they are connected to many levels of intermediate connections that DO lead back, ultimately, to your site.
The TouchGraph Google Browser site is incredibly fun to play with. A green info button on each box, that appears on mouse-overs, displays link info about that site. A popup window appears containing the page summary and a clickable hyperlink opens the actual page in a new window. Other tags on the boxes serve other purposes, but you can read about those when you get to the site.
You may have to disable your firewall to make the Java work for you, but whatever you have to do, I recommend that you go and experience how your links fit into the huge family of sites on the Internet.
As you stun yourself with the amazing TouchGraph Google Browser you will immediately appreciate the fantastic contribution that Tim Berners-Lee made to all of us when he invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory.
Where would many of us be today if Berners-Lee had not had the insight that enabled linking from any one place on the Web to any other place seamlessly, and today, almost instantly?
The TouchGraph Google Browser is far more than a toy, although it is worlds of fun to play with. In a way, it lets us see first hand the creativity of a man who enabled global information sharing on a level never seen before. He most certainly belongs in the ranks of all the greatest inventors in the world.
Once you see your interconnected Web revealed to you on the Touchgraph Google Browser, you will never be the same. This is because you will have actually seen that which you could only imagine before. It is an experience you will remember always. Click here to visit the TouchGraph Google Browser.
Published: December 10, 2003
