The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is my excellent colleague Ashwin Nagappa, who further highlights the challenges of doing research on search engines. Search engine research has long been considered an extension of the information retrieval disciplines, but this has been limiting: various other fields also have a stake in this, and in contrast to the situation, for instance, in social media research the research tools and data access provisions for search engine research are still a great deal more rudimentary.

Our work is in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making …

The next session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg has started with my great colleague Kateryna Kasianenko from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, who is presenting our work on exploring the impact of query variations on the results that search engines return. But how do we study such query variations systematically? How do we even determine what range of queries people might use as they search for a specific topic?

One answer to this wicked problem is via hackathons: but such hackathons tend to involve only interested participants, and people who may be …

I was the next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, presenting our study exploring how various communicative AI chatbots respond to a range of old and new conspiracy theories. This has also already come out as an article in Media and Communication:

Katherine M. FitzGerald, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, and Daniel Angus. “'Just Asking Questions': Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots.” Media and Communication 14 (2026). DOI: 10.17645/mac.11337.

Here are the slides for our presentation:

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, focussing especially on political advertising during the 2025 Australian federal election. This work is also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Computational advertising is ephemeral and targeted, individually personalised to the social media user; it is difficult to study these processes at scale. While platforms purport to provide some ad transparency libraries, these are limited, and can be enhanced through other approaches.

Some such approaches include data donations via browser plugins that capture the ads encountered by …

My QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, focussing on how search engines respond to searches about conspiracy theories. Search engines are a common pathway towards conspiracist information; they have the potential to affect their users’ understanding of such information. What people see when they search for such content also depends directly on how the query itself is formulated, so query variations also need to be studied systematically. Our Australian Search Experience 2.0 project within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society explores the impact of such query …

The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.

How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …