Time is money, especially if you are downloading web pages over low-bandwidth telephone lines, All too often this investment goes unrewarded. Users simply cannot extract relevant information from the mass of data that is being provided over the Internet. This information saturation is exacerbated by the problems of electronic gridlock. The increasing demand for remote resources has led to increasing delays during peak periods on popular sites. This paper argues that, in the short term, technological solutions to these problems will not keep pace with the exponential growth in demand. The world's communications infrastructure cannot be improved at the rate that would be required to combat increasing retrieval delays, We, therefore, advocate interface design techniques as the only effective means of addressing the usability problems that frustrate interaction with Internet resources, Later sections introduce a central argument that links the papers in this special edition, Collaborative approaches to information retrieval, where search engines are augmented by advice from human experts, can reduce the problems of electronic gridlock and information saturation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.
