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 …

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 …

After a week spent in Brussels and at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Internet Research in Aarhus, I’ve now arrived in Hamburg for the inaugural Search Engines and Society (SEASON) 2025 conference, which begins with a keynote by the great Matthias Spielkamp, the founder of German NGO AlgorithmWatch, who is also a partner in our ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His keynote reflects on the past ten years of AlgorithmWatch’s efforts to promote algorithmic accountability.

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit NGO based in Berlin and Zürich, seeking to ensure that algorithms serve to strengthen …