It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …

My own paper starts the final session at the the SEASON 2025 conference, presenting the Australian Search Experience team’s work towards assessing the effect of search query formulation on the diversity of search results, within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Here are the slides: 

The final speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Fabian Haak, whose interest is in biases in query suggestions. Search engines are key information gateways, and their search query suggestions guide user searches and can that way also influence users’ opinion formation processes. If query suggestions contain biases, then, this could reinforce societal inequities and perhaps even impact on the broader political landscape.

The present project worked with the names of some 352 US politicians, as well as their various personal, professional, and political attributes; it queried Google and Bing for these names, as well as adding …