Searchability of Central Nodes in Networks

Social networks are discrete systems with a large amount of heterogeneity among nodes (individuals). Measures of centrality aim at a quantification of nodes’ importance for structure and function. Here we ask to which extent the most central nodes can be found by purely local search. We find that many networks have close-to-optimal searchability under eigenvector centrality, outperforming searches for degree and betweenness. Searchability of the strongest spreaders in epidemic dynamics tends to be substantially larger for supercritical than for subcritical spreading.