In an embodiment of the invention, a system determines connections between source and target nodes in a network by determining edges with common nodes between the source and target nodes within the network for each of one or more hops. Each determined edge links a pair of nodes in a network path between the source and target nodes. The system removes certain edges from the determined edges to produce a resulting set of edges. In particular, each removed edge is an edge that includes a node within a loop in the network or is an edge that is unconnected to another edge. The system determines connections between the source and target nodes based on the resulting set of edges. Embodiments of the present invention further include a method and computer program product for determining connections between source and target nodes in a network in substantially the same manners described above.