In contrast with the formal, analytical strategies developed by professional intermediaries, information seekers also use a variety of informal, heuristic strategies. These informal, interactive strategies are clustered together under the term browsing strategies. In general, browsing is an approach to information seeking that is informal and opportunistic and depends heavily on the information environment. Four browsing strategies are distinguished in this chapter: scanning, observing, navigating, and monitoring. The term browsing reflects the general behavior that people exhibit as they seek information by using one of these strategies.

Browsing is a natural and effective approach to many types of information-seeking problems. It is natural because it coordinates human physical, emotive, and cognitive resources in the same way that humans monitor the physical world and search for physical objects. It can be effective because the environment and particularly human-created environments are generally organized and highly redundant – especially information environments that are designed according to organizational principles. Browsing is particularly effective for information problems that are ill defined or interdisciplinary and when the goal of information seeking is to gather overview information about a topic or to keep abreast of developments in a field.