Graphs and NetworksApplications

We have seen many different applications of graph theory in the previous chapters, although some of them were a bit contrived. However, it turns out that graphs are at the very foundation of many objects, concepts and processes in everyday life.

The Internet, for example, is a vast, virtual graph. Every vertex is an individual webpage, and every edge means that there is a hyperlink between two pages. Note that links only go one way, so this graph is , and that this graph is very, very, large.

Some websites, like Wikipedia or Facebook, have lots of incoming links, while many smaller websites may have very few incoming links. This is the underlying concept which Google uses to sort search results.