Information Foraging - History of The Theory

History of The Theory

In the 1970s optimal foraging theory was developed by anthropologists and ecologists to explain how animals hunt for food. It suggested that the eating habits of animals revolve around maximizing energy intake over a given amount of time. For every predator, certain prey are worth pursuing, while others would result in a net loss of energy.

In the early 1990s, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card from PARC noticed the similarities between users' information searching patterns and animal food foraging strategies. Working together with psychologists to analyse users' actions and the information landscape that they navigated (links, descriptions, and other data), they showed that information seekers use the same strategies as food foragers.

In the late 1990s, Ed H. Chi worked with Pirolli, Card and others at PARC further developed information scent ideas and algorithm to actually use these concepts in real interactive systems, including the modeling of web user browsing behavior, the inference of information needs from web visit log files, and the use of information scent concepts in reading and browsing interfaces.

In the early 2000s, Wai-Tat Fu worked with Pirolli to develop the SNIF-ACT model, which further extends the theory to provide mechanistic account of information seeking. The model provides good fits to link selection on Web pages, decision to leave a page (stickiness), and how both link text and its position may affect overall successes of information search. The SNIF-ACT model was also shown to exhibit statistical properties that resemble the law of surfing found in large-scale Web log data.