We begin the next session at the SEASON 2025 conference with a paper by Malte Rödl, whose interest is in how people now use the verb ‘to google’, and what this means about the social status of search engines in knowledge contestation. The term is now well established in most modern dictionaries, across many languages; Malte’s focus is on Swedish, where ‘googla’ is the verb form and therefore easily discoverable in online conversations too.

He gathered data from climate denialism blogs, Swedish-language Twitter, and a Swedish ‘free speech’ online forum on climate change, and examined the term in the contexts …

The final speaker on this first day of the SEASON 2025 conference is Kristofer Söderström, exploring differences between conventional search and the use of ChatGPT as an alternative. For users, practical distinctions between these tools may increasingly blur, considering the embedding of these technologies into each other; users may prefer LLMs because of their turn-based interrogability, though, and trust them more readily because of the convincing way in which results are presented.

How might we research and understand these practices, then? Kristofer’s study examined how Reddit users compare and contrast ChatGPT and Google Search, collecting some 271 threads from r/ChatGPT …

The third speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Natalie Tutzer, whose focus is on search engine optimisation (SEO) in the field of healthcare information. Finding reliable healthcare information online is fraught, and academic and non-commercial sources (such as authoritative patient guidelines) often lack visibility compared to material from commercial actors, in part also because many such materials are distributed as the online equivalents of print products – as PDFs – rather than as native Web content.

Can SEO measures make such content more visible online, without adjusting the – iteratively developed and authoritative – content itself …

After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …