Search Engines

And the final speakers in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Corinna Hertweck and Giovanni Astante, whose focus is on voting in Switzerland’s frequent referenda. How do Google’s and Bing’s AI Overviews perform in such contexts?

Referenda happen at all levels of Swiss democracy, with approximately four such votes (sometimes on several issues) happen per annum, and are surrounded by lively public debate. Information retrieved from AI Overviews might play a significant role in influencing voters’ decision-making processes; importantly, too, such votes are binary yes/no choices, which makes them different from conventional election decisions.

How often …

And the next speaker at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Patrick Parschan, presenting a paper that some of of my colleagues have also had a little input into. The focus here is on what sources are present in AI search results on information relating to elections; the focus here is especially on a number of recent German state elections.

Google and Bing have of course recently rolled out AI-generated search summaries, which have displaced the conventional organic search results; how such summaries are produced remains largely opaque at this point. This produces new risks: search is already a …

The first paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg that I’m attending is on search engines and political information, and starts with Íris Damião, whose focus is on political bias in search engines and Large Language Models. Search engines have evolved a lot since they emerged in the 1990s, of course, but continue to be very widely trusted by their users – even when searching for some very sensitive information.

This is the case for instance when searching for election information, where people also search for information on election procedures, party programmes, and even whom to vote for …

Another week, another conference: I’ve made my way to the SEASON (Search Engines and Society Network) 2026 conference in Hamburg, which is now in ist second year, and we start with a keynote by Thomas Höppner, who brings a legal perspective to the question of search engines and their role in society. Search engines serve as gatekeepers to information, and therefore have a key role to play in democracy: information is the currency and lifeblood of democracy (and indeed today is the International Day of Democracy, as it turns out).

So, if information is the currency of democracy, then the …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is by Leon Xiao, whose focus is on the regulation of Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPs and VLOSEs) by the EU Digital Services Act; these are defined as having more than 45 million active users in the EU (10% of the total EU population). 25 such platforms had already been identified (two of those VLOSEs, the remainder VLOPs); three more were added recently (including ChatGPT, as a VLOSE).

Under DSA Article 39, these now need to provide a publicly accessible, transparent, and searchable repository of advertising on …

The next speakers at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno are Guna Spurava and Arjen van Dalen, with a focus on algorithmic content recommendations and media governance in the Nordic and Baltic region. Both perspectives may have valuable contributions to make here. Algorithmic content recommendation systems affect how people access news and information, and this is a challenge for media regulation; is there a new governance paradigm emerging here, or to regulators continue on established (and perhaps no longer appropriate) paths?

Communication values are normative principles about what communication should achieve; in the Nordic countries these extend overall welfare state …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Mykola Makhortykh, with a video presentation. His interest is in Russian propaganda curation on search engines. Russian propaganda has of course been a major concern since at least the 2016 US elections; its influence operations have only increased since the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Much of this is driven by algorithmic information curation systems – via the Russian search engine Yandex, of course, but also through other mechanisms that affect western search engines. This project engaged in an agent-based algorithmic auditing of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

My next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the political role of search engines. During the 2024 US election, Donald Trump claimed that Google search engines and autocomplete search recommendations were favouring Kamala Harris; but we know far too little still on how search engines select their search results, and what effects these may have on their users’ information environments.

This particular paper explores how algorithmically selected information might affect users; this is also dependent on how users formulate their search queries, of course …