  We review a number of message-passing algorithms that can be used to search
through power-law networks. Most of these algorithms are meant to be
improvements for peer-to-peer file sharing systems, and some may also shed some
light on how unstructured social networks with certain topologies might
function relatively efficiently with local information. Like the networks that
they are designed for, these algorithms are completely decentralized, and they
exploit the power-law link distribution in the node degree. We demonstrate that
some of these search algorithms can work well on real Gnutella networks, scale
sub-linearly with the number of nodes, and may help reduce the network search
traffic that tends to cripple such networks.
