What makes the scent of a webpage?

September 9, 2024 11:21 AM

Information foraging is the fundamental theory of how people navigate on the web to satisfy an information need. It essentially says that, when users have a certain information goal, they assess the information that they can extract from any candidate source of information relative to the cost involved in extracting that information and choose one or several candidate sources so that they maximize the ratio: Rate of gain = Information value / Cost associated with obtaining that information from Information Foraging: A Theory of How People Navigate on the Web [NN/g]
posted by chavenet (5 comments total)

I both love this article and kind of hate it? Like it definitely makes a great case for why good user experience (the nn group's main job) is absolutely necessary but it also has a very strange conclusion that "Good User Experience Can Make Enrichments Unnecessary" which sort of implies that, unless I am reading this wrong, people can just decide what their page is about and optimize for that when in point of fact, that is fine if you are Aldi but less fine if you are some sort of archive or multi-purpose type of site/storage/etc. So giving agency to the user (who creates the enrichments that work for them) seems like an important thing that this article somewhat downplays by pushing the thing that they happen to be good at.

I am very "death of the author" about websites, people will find in them what they want and it may not be what you want to give them and I am also an information professional so it's quite possible that this is one of those things that is a very good thing for non-professionals to know and understand. Thanks for linking it.
posted by jessamyn at 11:38 AM on September 9 [9 favorites]

The main idea of "information scent" is one that I find both true (at least of my own experience) and important, but the way that it's operationalized is where I have questions. If I'm looking for dish towels, I'm not going to get thrown off because of advertising about candy and beer. I'm looking to my own life experiences to answer the question "Is Aldi likely to have dish towels?"

(Answer: grocery stores in general are moderately likely to have dish towels, but Aldi is a kind of weird grocery store. It's been probably 5 years since I've been in an Aldi so I'm not really sure. I will try the search bar.)

Where I find the "information scent" idea to be very relevant is if I'm looking for a product review - I've looked on Wirecutter, I've looked on Consumer Reports, and I still need more information, so I'm hunting through a lot of Google results that are mostly content farms, written by people who've never used the product, rehashing the Amazon reviews. So I'm mostly relying on the scent of the web site - and content farms have a pretty distinctive scent - to try to eliminate those.

(And then I give up and just put site:reddit.com in the search bar, having exhausted all the possibilities in that info patch.)
posted by Jeanne at 12:19 PM on September 9 [2 favorites]

What makes the scent of a webpage?

HTTPheromones.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on September 9 [7 favorites]

My dissertation, ten years ago, included an application of information foraging theory to describe how primates seek out and use social information, proposing an evolutionary relationship between neural mechanisms originally adapted for (food) foraging and those supporting social cognition, via exaption. Pirolli's book on Information Foraging Theory sits on my shelf right now between Niko Tinbergen's "Social Behavior in Animals" and David Marr's "Vision". So this is relevant to my interests, I guess is what I'm saying.
posted by biogeo at 12:57 PM on September 9 [8 favorites]

I submit that any theory of how people navigate the web that doesn't take into account the existence of Instant Monkeys Online is ultimately flawed.
posted by JHarris at 2:27 PM on September 9 [3 favorites]