Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers in 1994, who defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others".[1] 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, and that it is becoming more difficult to navigate and search efficiently with all the digital information available from the World Wide Web and other sources.[2] Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.[3]
Prior to the advancement of Web 2.0 and the Social Web, the World Wide Web had been a solitary space where users were unaware of where anyone else was browsing or navigating.[4] The scope of social navigation research has been increasing, especially as information visualization improves. Displaying social information in virtual spaces allows user behavior models to make digital systems feel more social and less solitary.[2]