Identity and Search in Social Networks

✍ Scribed by Watts, D. J.

• Book ID: 125435948
• Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 259 KB
• Volume: 296
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0036-8075
• DOI: 10.1126/science.1070120

✦ Synopsis

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.