Search Engines

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 …

We begin the next session at the SEASON 2025 conference with a paper by Malte Rödl, whose interest is in how people now use the verb ‘to google’, and what this means about the social status of search engines in knowledge contestation. The term is now well established in most modern dictionaries, across many languages; Malte’s focus is on Swedish, where ‘googla’ is the verb form and therefore easily discoverable in online conversations too.

He gathered data from climate denialism blogs, Swedish-language Twitter, and a Swedish ‘free speech’ online forum on climate change, and examined the term in the contexts …

Day two of the SEASON 2025 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by Anne Beaulieu, reflecting on the purpose and future of search. Search is now transforming considerably, especially given the intrusion of generative AI into the contiguous mix of uses for search, the impact of disinformation, the receding of the public sphere, and the impossibility of opting out from these systems; there is an urgent need to respond to this by rethinking search.

The way that students now engage with search engines and generative AI tools, for instance, reveals some of these changes and points to many of …

The final speaker on this first day of the SEASON 2025 conference is Kristofer Söderström, exploring differences between conventional search and the use of ChatGPT as an alternative. For users, practical distinctions between these tools may increasingly blur, considering the embedding of these technologies into each other; users may prefer LLMs because of their turn-based interrogability, though, and trust them more readily because of the convincing way in which results are presented.

How might we research and understand these practices, then? Kristofer’s study examined how Reddit users compare and contrast ChatGPT and Google Search, collecting some 271 threads from r/ChatGPT …

The second speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Aurelie Herbelot, presenting the PeARS search engine as an experiment in building a different type of Web search. Conventional search has significant issues with truth, biases, information verification, market monopolisation, and environmental impacts; one way of addressing these problems could be to decentralise search engine platforms, in the same way that Mastodon has sought to decentralise and federate social media.

So, there are now several PeARS instances, which are each dedicated to a specific topic of interest and curate information on their specialty topic. Linked together, this then …

The final session on this first day of the SEASON 2025 conference starts with Jennifer Gnyp, whose interest is in integrating language complexity into search; this is critical for inclusive search technologies. Inclusion only works if it is not the task of individuals to adjust and adapt to the societal mainstream, but if society removes the barriers that exclude such individuals; their needs must be considered from the beginning.

Key aspects to consider here are readability and comprehensibility, but readability focusses only on formal features while comprehensibility focusses on content and meaning, and measures the ease of understanding. This requires …

The final speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Nora Lindemann, who will focus especially on the role of Large Language Models in the information ecosystem. It’s important to note here that knowledge is embodied and situated, while information is broken-down knowledge that can be transferred through communication. This is also relational, where a relation is a connection between two entities that is constituted by their specific interaction and modulated by power.

Online information access is now rapidly changing, from (intransparently) algorithmically mediated conventional search results to the intrusion of AI-generated summaries into search results pages, or …

The next speakers in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference are Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl, whose interests are in what they call ignorance logics in search, with a particular focus on environmental issues. Algorithmic systems are involved in the shaping of knowledge, and of what is knowable and can be known; and societal responses to ecological crises, in particular, are now failing not so much because of a lack of knowledge but because of the possibility of ignorance. This is due in part also because of the curation of information by algorithmic black boxes.

Which worlds are made …