Identity and Search in Social Networks
+ Author Affiliations
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.
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↵* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: djw24@columbia.edu
- Received for publication 23 January 2002.
- Accepted for publication 3 April 2002.
