Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we sketch a model of how people search for information on the World Wide Web. Our interest lies in the cognitive properties and internal representations used in the search for information. We first collected behavioral data from individuals searching for answers to specific questions on the web, and we then analyzed these data to learn what searchers were doing and thinking. One finding was that individuals focus on key nodes when recalling their searches, and that these key nodes help structure memory. A second finding was that people tend to use the same search patterns over and over, and that they recall their searches in terms of their standard patterns—regardless of what they actually did. Overall, our results suggest that people form cognitive maps of web space in much the same the way that they form cognitive maps of physical space.