In my experience, finding the right search terms is 80% of the battle. Knowing the phrase "Dijkstra's Algorithm" is a big leg up here, and would put me only one

In my experience, finding the right search terms is 80% of the battle. Knowing the phrase "Dijkstra's Algorithm" is a big leg up here, and would put me only one or two degrees of separation away from the correct answer. If I didn't know that term, then I'd search "shortest path directed graph". That leads to a Wikipedia article with links to a variety of algorithms.