Finding Information

Information & Interaction Design

Mick McQuaid

University of Texas at Austin

29 Oct 2025

Week ELEVEN

Finding Information

In the future, attention will be our most precious resource.

Nearly half a century ago, Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon is alleged (the origin of the quote has been the subject of some controversy) to have said that in the future, attention will be our most precious resource. He may have meant that so much information will be available that we will only be able to pay attention to a small fraction of it and that the problem of deciding what to pay attention to will become the prominent problem of the information-intensive era.

Relationships between businesses and between businesses and customers have been transformed by the ease with which information can be found online. This transformation is ongoing. As an example of current change, some retail stores in the mid teens still forbade the use of smartphone cameras because they fear the use of search engines to make price comparisons. This was clearly not sustainable behavior. (To see why this is not sustainable, consider the point of view of the smartphone user making price comparisons. Is it more likely that the smartphone user will eliminate this particular store from the selection set or abandon the use of their smartphone?) If behavior is not sustainable, then we have to ask whether a steady state will be achieved and, if so, how it will differ.

Search engines

Revelation of personal information when you search

What do you think? Should you be compensated?

Read Page et al. (1999) and Wikipedia on PageRank

A person using a search engine reveals a great deal of personal information that has value for various stakeholders including business and government. Some activists believe that individuals should be compensated for the personal information they share with search engines. They believe that the contribution made by users to search engines can be quantified. Others claim users are compensated by search results and should quit complaining about search engines getting rich. But if the value of search results can be quantified and the value of user contributions can be quantified, policy makers may be convinced that consumers are being exploited and may seek to regulate search engines. This is one way the search engine industry may change in the near future.

Reading: Page and Brin, 1998. The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. stanford IL pub

Also, the Wikipedia entry on PageRank has some wonderful graphics illustrating the basic concept.

The term information scent may be a little confusing because it is borrowed from anthropology. It refers to the expectation of finding information along a given path. The strongest scents represent some balance of the easiest catches and the most nutritious meals.

The root concept comes from our primitive ancestors foraging for food and using scent to choose paths. When the scent stops getting stronger, a given path is abandoned.

Similarly, psychologists have found that when the expectation of finding information stops growing along a given information path, the path is abandoned. Pirolli and Card (1999) developed a theory of information foraging on this foundation. The phenomenon drives the propensity of content providers to make themselves easy quarry for information hunters.

The omnipresence of Google as a way for products and services to be found has led their providers to focus on providing an appropriate information scent online. The result is that the web presence for successful enterprises fits into a predictable pattern where, to continue the food analogy, visitors can get a quick snack, the menu changes frequently and predictably, and the dishes are easy to find, understand, and digest.

Reading: Tracking the Scent of Information, APA Monitor, V 43, N 3, P 44. Tracking the scent of information

Limits of search engines

Search by example

Search for things for which you have no name

Link rot

Conversational interfaces

Initial hype

The long game

First mover advantage vs market dominance

Corrosive influence of OpenAI on StackOverflow

Finding Information

Week ELEVEN

Finding Information

Search engines

Limits of search engines

Conversational interfaces

Information credibility