CHAPTER 7

Exploring and Finding Information

Peter Pirolli,     Palo Alto Research Center

7.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter will discuss recent theories that address how people forage for information in their environment. The emergence of the global information ecology has created enormous pressures for users who seek useful information. Understanding how people adapt to these pressures has led to the development of information-foraging theory and the notion of users following information scent. Information-foraging theory is grounded in computational theories of human cognition and optimal foraging theories from biology. Applications of the theory to a novel browsing system (called Scatter/Gather) and the World Wide Web illustrate the utility ...

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