Responsible Opinion Formation on Debated Topics in Web Search

Web search has evolved into a platform people rely on for opinion formation on debated topics. Yet, pursuing this search intent can carry serious consequences for individuals and society and involves a high risk of biases. We argue that web search can and should empower users to form opinions responsibly and that the information retrieval...

A Checklist to Combat Cognitive Biases in Crowdsourcing

Recent research has demonstrated that cognitive biases such as the confirmation bias or the anchoring effect can negatively affect the quality of crowdsourced data. In practice, however, such biases go unnoticed unless specifically assessed or controlled for. Task requesters need to ensure that task workflow and design choices do not trigger...

This Is Not What We Ordered: Exploring Why Biased Search Result Rankings Affect User Attitudes on Debated Topics

In web search on debated topics, algorithmic and cognitive biases strongly influence how users consume and process information. Recent research has shown that this can lead to a search engine manipulation effect (SEME): when search result rankings are biased towards a particular viewpoint, users tend to adopt this favored viewpoint. To better...

Assessing Viewpoint Diversity in Search Results Using Ranking Fairness Metrics

The way pages are ranked in search results influences whether the users of search engines are exposed to more homogeneous, or rather to more diverse viewpoints. However, this viewpoint diversity is not trivial to assess. In this paper we use existing and novel ranking fairness metrics to evaluate viewpoint diversity in search result rankings. We...