Mapping the Internet

What does the Internet look like from your computer? If you examined the path a packet would take from your computer to every network in the world, what would the resulting traces look like? Would the Internet look like a short bush, with packets flowing in a nice, consistent manner to each of the destinations, or would it be packets flowing every-which way, with two packets going to networks nearby on the network going on completely different paths? No one really knows that the Internet looks like. There's simply too much data. There are approximately 94,000 networks on the Internet, and, for at least packets originating at Bell Labs, there are over 88,000 unique IPs that packets flow through on their way to those networks (this count doesn't include those last-hop routers), with almost 100,000 different logical connections being used in the transit of those same packets.