Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 058701 (2009)

If you need a dentist in London, who do you ask? Perhaps a friend who lives there? Even if they don't have a name, they can put you in touch with another friend who might. In this strategy, called 'greedy routing', you navigate the network of Londoners without knowing its global structure.

Now Marián Boguñá of the University of Barcelona in Spain and Dmitri Krioukov at the University of California, San Diego, prove that greedy is speedy. They show that greedy routing yields the fastest journey through networks such as the Internet. They suggest that switching to greedy routing could improve the Internet's speed.