After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …

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 …

The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Aleksandra Urman, with a paper that audits the way the Russian-Ukrainian war has been framed in search results before and after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Search engines are of course key pathways to the news, especially during crises, and are often trusted more than any other source of news (including mainstream media); this means that they have a considerable role to play in connecting information seekers to the news of the day.

The way search engines rank information, then, has the potential to affect …