Built for Internet Archive's 20th anniversary celebration, Webverse is an interactive visualization of the Web in 3D. 200,000 top websites are gathered and grouped together based on the link structure between these websites. We then simulate this universe with a bang: as it expands in space, sites with strong bonds form clumps and clusters. It aims to reveal the underlying structures in the web, the hidden world behind each website. Two versions were created, one for 1996 and the other for 2016, enabling us to see how the Web has changed in the past 20 years.
The Internet Archive's mission statement is to provide universal access to all knowledge. Since 1996, it has been committed to saving billions of webpages and millions of websites, preserving these historical artifacts for generations to come.
3D web mapping, site and exploration engine by Owen Cornec
Site and Link Data provided by Vinay Goel of Internet Archive
A special thanks to Brewster Kahle, Wendy Hanamura and Katie Barrett of Internet Archive
Graph engine built on top of Three.js
Initial analysis with Modularity clustering and OpenOrd
Macro clustering with the map equation, Gephi and Force Atlas 3D
Micro clustering with Graphviz, SFDP and Neato
Data conversion and formatting: Python