Information spread in the age of the internet

The following work compares the spread of novel ideas through social networks by a `word-of-mouth' scheme compared to the spread of ideas through websites, by which ideas are published on the web and spread through search engines. Simulations of these two spreading models show that the spread by `word-of-mouth' is more effective than the spread through web pages and search engines. Search engines are indeed highly effective as information searching tools, but less effective as spreading tools for diverse new and previously unknown ideas.