Abstract

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 defined 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. In the late 1960’s, Travers and Milgram [1] conducted an experiment in which randomly selected individuals

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