Small-world network

A small-world network is a network where the paths between any two nodes are relatively short.

Examples:
 * social networks
 * the internet

A related concept is: Scale free network.

The paper The structure and function of complex networks contains an extremely useful table which summarizes the main characteristics of networks (internet, web, electricity, food, ...) such as diameter, exponent of the power law, ... as found in many different research papers.