Blog

The next speaker in this panel at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Laura Vodden, presenting her work on exploring LLM-assisted frame analysis of news coverage. This focusses here especially on Australian climate activism news coverage. The first challenge here, of course, is to understand framing, which usually includes a problem definition, suggested causes, proposed solutions, blame attribution, and and addressee for the solution. Such framing frequently occurs in news reporting.

Laura’s slides are here:

Frame analysis is a difficult and labour-intensive task, however; it requires critical engagement with complex material, and human coding is …

We start the first day of the AoIR 2025 conference proper with a panel on LLMs in research that involves several members of my QUT team. We start with a paper by Paul Pressmann, though, whose focus is on using LLMs in processing open-text responses from survey studies. The interest here is especially in questions of polarisation.

The data for this come from the POLTRACK project, which investigates the interrelations between individualised online information environments and polarisation. This combines Web tracking and surveys of some 2,000 participants. The survey component includes both closed- and open-ended questions that are used to …

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) …

And the final speaker at the SEASON 2025 conference, very fittingly, is our host Dirk Lewandowski, presenting findings from a study commissioned by the German State Media Authorities that focussed on the transformation of online search by the introduction of artificial intelligence technologies. This is of course still in progress, so no definitive results should be expected yet. The study was conducted in May 2025, and results will be published in mid-October.

But we can already reflect on whether the introduction of AI represents a revolutionary transformation, or merely an incremental change; and on how AI-enhanced search affects the economic …

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 Elsa Lichtenegger, whose projects is exploring the question of search intent. Why do people search, what drives them, what is their motivation, what are their goals? Search intent describes the user’s underlying goal or purposes, which is expressed through the initial search query and may be refined through further search iterations.

A definition of search intent by Broder (2002) tends to be dominant in the available literature on the topic; this has considerable impact on extant research. It distinguishes three types of user intent: informational intent (seeking information) …

The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Desheng Hu, whose project is auditing Google’s AI Overviews and Featured Snippets, especially in the context of information seeking on pregnancy and childbirth. Many new parents will be using Google for information-seeking as well, and may blindly trust the information they obtain; this information now also includes the recently introduced AI Overviews and/or Featured Snippets.

These are often placed at the very top of the page, and will thereby capture a great deal of users’ attention – but they have already been shown to be unreliable and inconsistent …

The last full paper session at the SEASON 2025 conference starts with a paper by Cecilia Andersson, whose focus is on multilingualism in online search practices. Bi- and multilingualism is becoming increasingly prevalent, and language and cultural contexts are inseparable from information seeking processes; search engine results, for instance, are inherently influenced by the languages used in searching, and/or the language of the search interface.

Half the world, and 56% of EU citizens, are functionally bilingual, with English often as one of these languages; this is in part also a result of migration between countries, of course. Such bi- and …

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 …