Social navigation

Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Dourish and Chalmers in 1994. They defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artefact of the activity of another or a group of others". According to later research in 2002, "social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources" to guide users in the information space. With all of the digital information available both on the World Wide Web and from other sources, it is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and search efficiently. Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by helping them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others. "The idea of social navigation is to aid users to navigate information spaces through making the collective, aggregated, or individual actions of others visible and useful as a basis for making decisions on where to go next and what to choose."