Information foraging's most famous concept is information scent : users estimate a given hunt's likely success from the spoor: assessing whether their path exhibits cues related to the desired outcome. Information Scent: Predicting a Path's Success That's what makes information foraging a useful tool for analyzing online media. In any case, people like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort. Humans are under less evolutionary pressure to improve their web use, but basic laziness is a human characteristic that might be survival-related (don't exert yourself unless you have to).

After thousands of generations, optimal food-gathering behavior is all that's left. Not that critters run mathematical computations, but rather that suboptimal behaviors result in starvation, and thus there are fewer offspring that follow those behaviors in subsequent generations. Animals make decisions on where, when, and how to eat on the basis of highly optimized formulas. To say that web users behave like wild beasts in the jungle sounds like a joke, but there's substantial data to support this claim. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online. Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from human-computer interaction research since 1993.

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