How to search a social network

By Lada A. Adamic, Eytan Adar. Soc. Networks, 2003

692 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We address the question of how participants in a small world experiment are able to find short paths in a social network using only local information about their immediate contacts. We simulate such experiments on a network of actual email contacts within an organization as well as on a student social networking website. On the email network we find that small world search strategies using a contact’s position in physical space or in an organizational hierarchy relative to the target can effectively be used to locate most individuals. However, we find that in the online student network, where the data is incomplete and hierarchical structures are not well defined, local search strategies are less effective. We compare our findings to recent theoretical hypotheses about underlying social structure that would enable these simple search strategies to succeed and discuss the implications to social software design.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/562f2026ad966f6b138856dd0916a7eca135481f

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In Sociology and Political Science

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Preserving Privacy in Social Networks Against Neighborhood Attacks (2008, background): “Recently, as more and more social network data has been made publicly available [1], [2], [3], [4], preserving privacy in publishing social network data becomes an important concern.”
Wherefore art thou r3579x?: anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography (2007, background): “We describe a family of attacks such that even from a single anonymized copy of a social network, it is possible for an adversary to learn whether edges exist or not between speci.c targeted pairs of nodes.”
Optimal foraging in semantic memory. (2012, background): “…searching for mathematical solutions (Hills, 2009), searching for web pages (Fu & Pirolli, 2007), seeking and recalling contacts in social networks (Adamic & Adar, 2005; Hills & Pachur, in press), finding mates spread out over time (Todd & Miller, 1999), as well as searching in literal space.”
Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research (2014, result): “Other studies have examined robustness and changes of results across a range of thresholds (Romero et al. 2011, Adamic & Adar 2005, De Choudhury et al. 2010) both with and without a requirement of bidirectionality.”
The convergence of social and technological networks (2008, background): “1 Here too, this rate approximated an analogue of the inverse-square law— in a form adapted to hierarchies 21, 39 —although the messages in the re-searchers’ data were skewed a bit more toward long-range contacts in the organization than short-range ones.”
ArnetMiner: extraction and mining of academic social networks (2008, background): “Adamic and Adar [ 1 ] have investigated the problem of association search in email networks.”
Enhancing Expert Finding Using Organizational Hierarchies (2009, background): “, [2]) has suggested that those in close proximity within an organization are more likely to share knowledge via email.”
Wherefore Art Thou R3579x? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography (background): “…most promising opportunities for the study of social networks are emerging from data on domains where users have strong expectations of privacy — these include e-mail and messaging networks, as well as the link structure of closed (i.e. " members-only " ) on-line communities [1] [2] [17] [19] [21].”
The structure of information pathways in a social communication network (2008, background): “The complete traces of communication within a network of people has been studied at moderate scales in recent years [1, 9], and very recently there have been analyses of very large-scale networks based on phone calls [27] and instant messaging [22].”
Information Contagion: An Empirical Study of the Spread of News on Digg and Twitter Social Networks (2010, positive): “…recently social media, have only enhanced the role of networks in marketing (Domingos and Richardson 2001; Kempe, Kleinberg, and ´ Eva Tardos 2003), information dissemination (Wu et al. 2004; Gruhl and Liben-nowell 2004), search (Adamic and Adar 2005), and expertise discovery (Davitz et al. 2007).”