As mentioned above, it is difficult to locate where a piece of information
originated and on what passage the information traveled within
the Internet. We took an alternative way of untangling this problem.
We examined the hyperlink associations among the domains.
Hyperlinks are connections between Web pages that allow users to
traverse from one page to another simply by clicking on the hyperlink.
Hyperlinks on the Web thus can be considered not simply technological
tools but communication channels. A growing body of research
has begun to study hyperlink associations in the various fields of
communication studies.