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.
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 …
