...

...

One of my arguments is that keyword searching tends to give a number of results that are fairly high in information (in the technical sense of information theory...unpredictability), and that can be conducive to new insights and creative thinking as the user tries to figure out why certain results were returned. It seems to me that this is somewhat similar to surfing the web, where people may be stimulated to think about things in new ways as they go from site to site and, in the process, encounter ways of approaching things that had not occurred to them before. I haven't been able to find anything about how web surfing affects the way people think about things. Do you know of anything that has been done along those lines?

I agree with your hypothesis. What you are looking for is often discussed under the notion of "serendipity effect". A search with this keyword might bring you to the literature you are looking for. In my book on "Cyberscience" I discuss in some depth the idea that the new media have a creative potential (also for science and research). This relates not only to the effect you are describing (by- products of database search), but also to serendipitous contacts with people and to the creativity contained in what Stevan Harnad used to call "scholarly skywriting". These ideas are, however, not undisputed. At the reverse side of the coin we find for instance the usual "lost in hyperspace" argument. Hope this helps, MN ------------- M. Nentwich http://eiop.or.at/mn/ author of "Cyberscience" http://hw.oeaw.ac.at/3188-7