likely to get on a given path, and after seeking information compare the actual outcome with their predictions. When the information scent stops getting stronger (i.e., when users no longer expect to find useful additional information), the users move to a different information source. Information diet Some tendencies in the behaviour of web users are easily understood from the information foraging theory standpoint. On the Web, each site is a patch and information is the prey. Leaving a site is easy, but finding good sites has not always been as easy. Advanced search engines have changed this fact by reliably providing relevant links, altering the foraging strategies of the users. When users expect that sites with lots of information are easy to find, they have less incentive to stay in one place. The growing availability of broadband connections may have a similar effect: always-on connections encourage this behavior, short online visits to get specific answers. Models Attempts have been made to develop computational cognitive models to characterize information foraging behavior on the Web. These models assume that users perceive relevance of information based on some measures of information scent, which are usually derived based on statistical techniques that extract semantic relatedness of words from large text databases. Recently these information foraging models have been extended to explain social information behavior. See also models of collaborative tagging. Notes Sources Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster by Jakob Nielsen, June 30, 2003, Alertbox. High-tech quest for a user-friendly Web, June 2, 2002, USA Today. Word Spy – information foraging, December 19, 2002. Human–computer interaction