Have you been to linkedin lately? Chances are that you have been. And did you notice the “How you’re connected to …” section if you view anyone’s profile while you are logged in? If yes, read on…
Me and a collegue have been wondering this afternoon what algorithm might Linkedin be using to display the listing. A quick thought that comes to the mind is that they keep a graph of all the people registered and do a BFS or a DFS to it. Or a shortest path algorithm? The next second it dawned upon our minds that how quick the page shows up. They can never comeup with such a fast lookup of “How you’re connected to …” list with just a plain BFS or DFS on such a big graph. Maybe they keep a graph of subgraphs so that all the connected people are part of a subgraph and check later if the subgraphs for the two people in concern are connected.
Till now I don’t have a convincing answer. I can only come up with time complexity disasters which will hardly scale.
Maybe there is a simple answer to it. Maybe you know it or you started to think about it and the algorithm clicked in your mind and you said – “A piece of cake!”. Chances are that you already know it( Thanks to your ever boasting ever puzzle-questioning collegue) or with your advanced google searching skillset you can get it in minutes.
Do throw it at me. I am still haunted.
Tags: Linkedin
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