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The Australian Search Experience to analyse over 350 million search results

Author Kathy Nickels
Date 15 July 2022

Researchers investigating whether people’s search results vary depending on who they are will be analysing over 350 million search results to uncover the impact of the recommendation algorithms producing Google and YouTube search results.

The Australian Search Experience invited Australians to install a browser plugin that automatically queried Google Search, Google News, Google Video, and YouTube several times a day on key topics. 

Over the past 12 months, the plugin searched on our participants’ Chrome, Edge, and Firefox browsers on 48 topics, from “who should I vote for in the federal election” to “COVID vaccines” and “Tokyo Olympics”.

These data donations from the more than 1,000 citizen scientists who had installed the plugin were crucial to developing a broader perspective on the search results that ordinary Australians encounter as they use these search engines.

Chief Investigator Professor Axel Bruns, an internationally renowned Internet researcher in QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, said the project explores whether search engines have the potential to create ‘filter bubbles’ or to promote misinformation and disinformation.

“These results will be analysed to understand the personalisation of search results for critical news and information, across key platforms including Google and YouTube, based on the profiles that these platforms establish for their different users.

“We are also interested in seeing how information changes over time: as news breaks or the available information evolves, how long does it take for this to be reflected in the search results? And is this driven solely by recommendation algorithms, or is there evidence of manual curation too?”

To date, the analysis has indicated that there is only very limited, largely benign personalisation in the results produced by Google Search: some results may vary depending on the state where Australian users are located, but there is no evidence of widely diverging search results based on personal identity or ideology – commonly described as ‘filter bubbles’.

The project has attracted international attention from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where researchers are planning to launch a Dutch equivalent to the Australian Search Experience project in the coming months. This will produce valuable comparative data.

Professor Bruns will be presenting the Australian Search Experience project: Background paper alongside national and international research on responsible, ethical and inclusive automated services, at the 2022 ADM+S Symposium next week.

The project is a partnership between researchers from Australian universities within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society (ADM+S) and the international research and advocacy organisation AlgorithmWatch, which developed an earlier version of the Search Experience plugin for a pilot study in Germany in 2017.

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