The Use of Proximal Information Scent to Forage for Distal Content on the World Wide Web (01 Aug 2004)

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The Use of Proximal Information Scent to Forage for Distal Content on the World Wide Web (01 Aug 2004)
The particular focus of this chapter will be on a psychological theory of information scent (Pirolli, 1997, 2003; Pirolli & Card, 1999) that is embedded in a broader model (Pirolli & Fu, 2003) of information foraging on the Web. The notion of information scent also has been used in developing models of people seeking information in document-clustering browsers (Pirolli, 1997) and highly interactive information visualizations (Pirolli, Card, & Van Der Wege, 2003). Information scent refers to the cues used by information foragers to make judgments related to the selection of information sources to pursue and consume. These cues include items such as Web links or bibliographic citations that provide users with concise information about content that is not immediately available. The information scent cues play an important role in guiding users to the information they seek, and they also play a role in providing users with an overall sense of the contents of collections. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical account of information scent that supports the development of models of navigation choice.

Article URL: http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/uir/pubs/items/UIR-2004-07-Pirolli-ProximalInformationScent.pdf

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