Understanding Viewpoint Biases in Web Search Results

Boosting Intellectual Humility to Mitigate Confirmation Bias during Web Search

Searching the web on debated topics, which are issues under active discussion and where individual opinions diverge, can be highly challenging. It requires users to approach their queries objectively, browse many resources, and accept a certain level of uncertainty, even if it conflicts with personal values. In particular, confirmation bias, the...

How Is Attitude Change in Web Search Influenced by Users’ Informedness?

Search engines are used to gather and collect information. This interaction sometimes influences the user and changes their attitude towards a topic after such interaction. Prior work has shown that it is a complex endeavour to understand attitude change, as there are many things that can influence a user during a search session. One of the...

Children and Information Access: Fostering a Sense of Belonging

In this vision paper, we spotlight children as often underserved users in the digital ecosystem. With online search as a use case, we discuss the need for a multi-perspective approach to designing interactive interfaces and technologies that can enable information access systems to better respond to children's requirements while respecting...

How does Information Pollution Challenge Children’s Right to Information Access?

Informed by existing literature, in addition to lessons learned from ongoing research work pertaining to online information seeking, in this contribution, we discuss our view of how information pollution affects a critical yet understudied user group: children. We first highlight the need to take into account the unique characteristics of...

Explainable Cross-Topic Stance Detection for Search Results

One way to help users navigate debated topics online is to apply stance detection in web search. Automatically identifying whether search results are against, neutral, or in favor could facilitate diversification efforts and support interventions that aim to mitigate cognitive biases. To be truly useful in this context, however, stance...

Searching for the Whole Truth: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Humility to Boost Better Search on Debated Topics

We often use search engines when seeking information for opinion-forming and decision-making on debated topics. However, searching for resources on debated topics to gain well-rounded knowledge is cognitively demanding, leaving us vulnerable to cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias. This can impede well-informed decision-making, and on...

Into the Unknown: Exploration of Search Engines' Responses to Users with Depression and Anxiety

Researchers worldwide have explored the behavioral nuances that emerge from interactions of individuals afflicted by mental health disorders (MHD) with persuasive technologies, mainly social media. Yet, there is a gap in the analysis pertaining to a persuasive technology that is part of their everyday lives: web search engines (SE). Each day,...

"Who are you?": Identifying Young Users from a Single Search Query

As an initial step towards enabling the adaptation of (popular, and widely used) web search environments so that they can better serve children and ease their path towards information discovery, we introduce Recognizing Young Searchers (RYSe). RYSe leverages lexical, syntactical, spelling/punctuation, and vocabulary features that align with...

Effects of Time Constraints and Search Results Presentation on Web Search

Everybody experiences time constraints in their day­-to­-day lives, possibly influencing our judgment abilities and behavior. In contemporary daily life, search en­gines are regularly consulted to look for information online with searchers commonly experiencing time pressure during the web search process. Therefore, this work investigates how...

Impact of Biased Search Results on User Engagement in Web Search

Search engines play an important role in the provision of information. Recently, researchers have raised their concerns about the potential of search engine providers trying to shift the opinion of their users by manipulating search results. But search results might also be manipulated for financial gain. If an increase in User Engagement (UE)...

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...

This Item Might Reinforce Your Opinion: Obfuscation and Labeling of Search Results to Mitigate Confirmation Bias

During online information search, users tend to select search results that confirm previous beliefs and ignore competing possibilities. This systematic pattern in human behavior is known as confirmation bias. In this paper, we study the effect of obfuscation (i.e., hiding the result unless the user clicks on it) with warning labels and the...

How do user opinions influence their interaction with web search results?

Understanding the influence of users' opinions on their search behavior together with their inherent biases in web search has garnered widespread interest in recent times. This is largely due to the implications of promoting critical thinking, explaining phenomena such as political polarization, or the manifestation of echo chambers. It is...

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...

Towards Memorable Information Retrieval

Information overload is a problem many of us can relate to nowadays. The deluge of user generated content on the Internet, and the easy accessibility to a vast amount of data compounds the problem of remembering and retaining information that is consumed. To make information consumed more memorable, strategies such as note-taking have been found...

How Does Team Composition Affect Knowledge Gain of Users in Collaborative Web Search?

Studies in searching as learning (SAL) have revealed that user knowledge gain not only manifests over a long-term learning period, but also occurs in single short-term web search sessions. Though prior works have shown that the knowledge gain of collaborators can be influenced by user demographics and searching strategies in long-term...

TaskGenie: Crowd-Powered Task Generation for Struggling Search

Search tasks provide a medium for the evaluation of system performance and the underlying analytical aspects of IR systems. Researchers have recently developed new interfaces or mechanisms to support vague information needs and struggling search. However, little attention has been paid to the generation of a unified task set for evaluation...