/info-foraging

The domain of searching for information under limited attention. These principles hold for any search for good items you cannot name in advance, in any field. What counts as good comes from whoever runs the search.

Principles

1. Follow information scent. Cues you see before opening something (titles, snippets, who points to it, how many do) are scent: a guess at what lies behind it. Head where scent is strongest, but it is only a guess: open the item itself to judge it. Popularity is one such cue.
2. Leave a patch when its rate falls to the average. A source yields less the longer you stay. Leave once what you gain there per unit of time falls below the average rate across all sources, counting the time it takes to move between them.
3. Pick a diet by profitability. Rank kinds of items by value per time to handle them. Take the most profitable kinds; add a less profitable kind only if it raises your overall rate. So the diet narrows when good items are plentiful and widens when they are scarce.
4. Enrich the patch. Spend effort to raise the rate later, either within patches (sharper queries, filters) or between them (a list of good sources). It pays when the higher rate makes up for the time spent enriching.

Definitions

• Patch: a place where items cluster, such as a site, feed, list or person.
• Scent: the cues you use to guess an item's value before opening it.