Small-World Phenomena and the Dynamics of Information

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)

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Authors

Jon Kleinberg

Abstract

The problem of searching for information in networks like the World Wide Web can be approached in a variety of ways, ranging from centralized indexing schemes to decentralized mechanisms that navigate the underlying network without knowledge of its global structure. The decentralized approach appears in a variety of settings: in the behavior of users browsing the Web by following hyperlinks; in the design of

focused crawlers [4, 5, 8] and other agents that explore the Web's links to gather information; and in the search protocols underlying decentralized peer-to-peer sys- tems such as Gnutella [10], Freenet [7], and recent research prototypes [21, 22, 23], through which users can share resources without a central server.