The relevance of information scent to information seeking on the Web

Based on information foraging theory, the study addressed four research questions and five hypotheses. Participants (N=24, randomly assigned to one of four groups of six participants each) searched for information about different content (skin cancer and heart disease) within two different Web sites, one containing high scent links and one containing low scent links. This experiment demonstrated that high information scent Web sites significantly decreased perceived task complexity and time on task and increased task accuracy. Conversely, perceived task complexity was not found to be significantly lower in Web sites with high information scent. User preference was not significantly higher in Web sites with high information scent.