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Information Foraging Theory adapts optimal foraging theory from behavioural ecology to model how humans allocate attention and navigation effort across information environments, treating users as rational agents maximising information gain per unit cost. The central mechanism, information scent, quantifies the proximal cues (link text, snippets, anchor context) users evaluate to predict distal information value, with patch exploitation decisions triggering site abandonment when marginal scent signals fall below inter-patch travel cost thresholds. For search systems, this framework demands that crawlers prioritise anchor-rich, semantically coherent link graphs, that ranking signals weight snippet-to-content semantic fidelity as a scent-accuracy proxy, and that indexing architectures surface high-scent pathway structures - since pages generating low click-through despite high impressions signal scent-content mismatch, a recoverable relevance failure distinct from authority or freshness deficits.