Understanding Research on Navigation in Complex Digital Environments

While hypertext and the ideas surrounding it have clearly been around for decades (see Bush, 1945; Nelson, 1965), the recent and unprecedented growth of contemporary technologies has afforded and necessitated their exploration, development, and deployment (McKnight, Dillon, & Richardson, 1991). Current estimates of the World Wide Web, the most prominent manifestation of hypertext today, indicate that it is comprised of over 60 million servers housing more than 11.5 billion indexed pages (Gulli & Signorini, 2005). This estimate does not account for content that is not indexable by search engines (e.g., Google), sometimes called the “invisible Web,” which likely exceeds the amount of indexed content by 400 to 550 times (Lyman & Varian, 2000). These statistics reflect a startling 60,000% increase in quantity in less than 10 years. In conjunction with the exponential expansion of hypermedia content afforded by the Web, there is also an increasing trend in Internet usage. Well over one billion people worldwide actively participate in online activities (Internet World Stats, 2006). The fastest growing segment of the population to embrace the Web is children ages 9 to 17. Internet usage by children and adolescents of elementary and high school age has intensified, rising from about one third of 9to 17-year-olds in 1997 to about two thirds in 2001 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002) to nearly 74% in 2005 (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2005). Further, survey research shows that 94% of students ages