# Information scent Information scent is the set of cues that tell you whether a path leads to what you want: a link label, a title, a search snippet, the words around a link. You look at those cues, estimate how likely the path is to pay off, and decide whether to follow it. Strong scent: you click. Weak scent: you give up, or you go look somewhere else. The concept comes from information foraging theory, developed by [[Peter Pirolli]] and [[Stuart Card]] at Xerox PARC (first presented at CHI in 1995, then published in *Psychological Review* in 1999). The theory describes people looking for information the way biologists describe animals looking for food: they weigh what they'll gain against the effort it costs. Information scent is its most important concept. As animals follow a scent to find prey, people follow cues in the information environment. And when the scent stops getting stronger, they leave and move to another source. Two other concepts of the theory complete the picture: - **Patches**: clusters of information where you stay for a while before moving on (a website, a folder, a Map of Content) - **Diet**: deciding which items are worth pursuing at all, and which ones to skip ## Why it matters for PKM In a vault, information scent is titles, link text, aliases, the `description` property and search snippets. Every time you scan a list of notes (search results, backlinks, a Map of Content, a Base), you're judging scent. - **Descriptive titles carry scent.** A good title is a search target, a link anchor and a scent cue all at once. A title like `Meeting notes` or `Untitled 23` has no scent at all: you have to open the note to know what it is. Claim-style titles are even better, because you can judge a note without opening it - **The line of context next to a link matters.** A [[Map of Content (MoC)|MoC]] with 50 bare links forces you to open each note to know whether it's relevant, and every opened note costs time and attention. A short sentence next to the link gives you the scent without the click - **A one-line `description`** at the top of important notes does the same job in Bases, search results and hover previews This is layer 4 of my [[Findability stack|findability stack]] (links and maps) in action: links only help you find things if they carry enough scent to tell you which one to follow. It's also the [[Encoding specificity principle|encoding specificity principle]] at the moment of choice: the words in a title or a link label need to match what you have in mind when you're looking. Weak scent explains why a note can feel "lost" even though search could technically find it: you see it in the results, but nothing tells you it's the one. That's a [[Findability|findability]] problem, and you fix it at writing time. ## References - Pirolli, P., & Card, S. K. (1995). Information foraging in information access environments. *Proceedings of CHI '95*, 51-58. https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223911 - Pirolli, P., & Card, S. K. (1999). Information foraging. *Psychological Review*, 106(4), 643-675. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.106.4.643 - Information foraging (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging - Nielsen Norman Group, "Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next": https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/ ## Related - [[Findability]] - [[Findability stack]] - [[Map of Content (MoC)]] - [[Encoding specificity principle]] - [[Stuart Card]] - [[Peter Pirolli]] - [[The Complete Guide to Obsidian Search - Find Any Note When You Need It (Article)]] - [[Design Notes You Can Find - Names, Aliases, Types and Metadata in Obsidian (Article)]]