This is really basic stuff, guys. Entirely intuitive. It's just another kind of fractal. Whenever you need to navigate through a complicated network, it's always a good bet to get to the highest point of heirarchy, and then work back down.

A good example of this is the wikipedia game where you try to link a random wiki to Hitler with only blue links on the pages, using the fewest jumps possible. Now, if you were stupid and tried clicking random links until you got to Hitler, then it would take many links. But obviously no one does that. You know what to do, even if you've never thought about it. You go up to country level, go to Germany, and then Hitler will be on that page somewhere. There are also rare cases when going through "war" is faster. But those two paths account for well over 90% of ALL paths to Hitler.

Another example is road navigation. If you want to cross the country, you know that you have to try to get to the most major highway possible as soon as possible to minimize travel time (up to traffic) and navigation concerns.

This is so intuitively obvious that I don't understand how people can doubt/not understand it.