Introduction 

Information Foraging

Which of these activities occupies more of your time: foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We're all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.

But in an odd sort of way, Internet shopping has brought us full circle. According to researchers in the US, the strategies you use when you surf the Web are exactly the same as the ones hunter-gatherers used to find food. You may be plugged into the information superhighway, but deep down you're still a caveman.

Rachel Chalmers, "Surf like a caveman" New Scientist issue: 11 November 2000

Search engines help us find information, products, and services on the Internet. Knowing more about these tools will make us better "informavores."