Information-seeking time: Only a subpart of web home page elements matters

During goal oriented web navigation does the competition for web selection depend on all navigation options or only those options which are more likely to be functional for information seeking? Here we provide evidence in favour of the latter alternative. Within a representative set of real web sites of variable breadth, the time required to reach a goal located at the depth of two clicks from the home page is accounted for by C, an objective measure of the complexity of the start page, based on the number of links weighted by the number and type of embedding web elements. Our results demonstrate how focusing on links while ignoring other web elements optimizes the deployment of attentional resources necessary to navigation