Toms, E.G.: What motivates the browser? (1999)
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- Abstract
- Browsing is considered to be unstructured and human-driven, although not a cognitively intensive process. It is conducted using systems that facilitate considerable user-system interactivity. Cued by the content, people immerse themselves in a topic of interest and meander from topic to topic while concurrently recognising interesting and informative information en route. They seem to seek and gather information in a purposeless, illogical and indiscriminate manner. Typical examples of these ostensibly random acts are scanning a non-fiction book, examining the morning newspaper, perusing the contents of a business report and scavenging the World Wide Web. Often the result is the acquisition of new information, the rejection or confirmation of an idea, or the genesis of new, perhaps not-wholly-formed thoughts about a topic. Noteworthy about this approach is that people explore information without having consciously structured queries or explicit goals. This form of passive information interaction behaviour is defined as acquiring and gathering information while scanning an information space without a specific goal in mind (Waterworth & Chignell, 1991; Toms, 1997), and for the purposes of this study, is called browsing. Traditionally, browsing is thought of in two ways: as a physical process - the action taken when one scans a list, a document, or a set of linked information nodes (e.g., Fox & Palay, 1979; Thompson & Croft, 1989; Ellis, 1989), and as a conceptual process, information seeking when the goal is ill-defined (e.g., Cove & Walsh, 1987). Browsing is also combined with searching in an integrated information-seeking process for retrieving information (e.g., Ellis, 1989; Belkin, Marchetti & Cool, 1993; Marchionini, 1995; Chang, 1995). Each of these cases focuses primarily on seeking information when the objective ranges from fuzzy to explicit.
- Source
- Exploring the contexts of information behaviour: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts, 13-15 August 1998, Sheffield, UK. Ed. by D.K. Wilson u. D.K. Allen
