Identity and Search in Social Networks

Social networks have the surprising property of being “searchable”: Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a model that offers an explanation of social network searchability in terms of recognizable personal identities: sets of characteristics measured along a number of social dimensions. Our model defines a class of searchable networks and a method for searching them that may be applicable to many network search problems, including the location of data files in peer-to-peer networks, pages on the World Wide Web, and information in distributed databases.

• Publication year

  2002

• Venue

  Science

• Publication date

  2002-05-17

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Physics, Computer Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/science.1070120arXiv cond-mat/0205383PMID 12016312
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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