When making decisions, passing judgments, or testing hypotheses, people often search for additional information to find the best course of action or to evaluate their final choice. In these types of situations, research has consistently shown that there is a preference to search for information on the option/hypothesis that people currently prefer or believe to be true. This type of information search is so widespread that it has been published in different areas of psychology and under many different names, for example, selective exposure (e.g., Frey, 1986), confirmation bias (e.g., Nickerson, 1989), and positive test strategies (e.g., Klayman & Ha, 1987), just to name a few. Just as widespread as the phenomena are theories and potential explanations for it. In this project, I propose that the common core of these search phenomena is the striving for a consistent representation of the surrounding world and the self. Therefore, observed differences between search phenomena may stem from the activation of different mechanisms of striving for consistency. These mechanisms can range from reinterpreting the available information to adjusting currently-held attitudes and can be applied to different levels of the task. Based on these assumptions, I strive for a common taxonomy of “biased” search processes which aims to identify differences and commonalities between the published search phenomena and their underlying theories. This taxonomy will be the first step in reconciling the different streams of literature and provide a basis to empirically disentangle the contributions of different cognitive and motivational processes to “biased” information search.