Search Engines

I’m presenting some early results of our large-scale dynamic practice mapping of Australian climate change discussions on Facebook later in this next session at the Weizenbaum Conference, but we begin with a paper by Konstantin Lackner, Markus Uhlmann, and Viktoria Horn. Their focus is on news navigation and recommendation: recommendations enable users to navigate information overload, but also create potential monetary gain for content sources.

Recommendations can be problematic because they optimise for retention and attention, and therefore for profit; this is also increasingly done through AI; and the result of such recommendations may be that users no longer …

The final session on day one of the Weizenbaum Conference starts with a second paper by Victoria Vziatysheva, whose focus here is on how users perceive search engine bias. Search engines are amongst the most critical elements of Internet infrastructure, but are sometimes criticised for supposed biases in their results; this may affect how users engage with them.

Users tend to trust algorithmic systems more when they are perceived to be fair, and such trust is also affected by users’ knowledge about these systems: users with limited knowledge tend to be more trusting. Search engine users tend to have folk …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Victoria Vziatysheva; she begins by noting that pre-existing beliefs affect what information we engage with – this is selective exposure. But studies have also shown that the use of search engines can reduce selective exposure; whether this is the case also depends on the way search queries are formulated in the first place, however.

Victoria’s project explored this in the context of a Swiss referendum on a responsible economy within the planet’s limits (which was ultimately rejected); this connected voting intentions on this referendum with search queries that reflected attitudes for …