Explore All Articles
All Articles
Article Topic
How alt-tech users evaluate search engines: Cause-advancing audits
Evan M. Williams and Kathleen M. Carley
Search engine audit studies—where researchers query a set of terms in one or more search engines and analyze the results—have long been instrumental in assessing the relative reliability of search engines. However, on alt-tech platforms, users often conduct a different form of search engine audit.
GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation
Jutta Haider, Kristofer Rolf Söderström, Björn Ekström and Malte Rödl
Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research.
Less reliable media drive interest in anti-vaccine information
Samikshya Siwakoti, Jacob N. Shapiro and Nathan Evans
As progress on vaccine rollout in the United States slowed down in Spring 2021, it became clear that anti-vaccine information posed a public health threat. Using text data from 5,613 distinct COVID misinformation stories and 70 anti-vaccination Facebook groups, we tracked highly salient keywords regarding anti-vaccine discourse across Twitter, thousands of news websites, and the Google and Bing search engines from May through June 2021, a key period when progress on vaccinations very clearly stalled.
Search engine manipulation to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda
Evan M. Williams and Kathleen M. Carley
The Kremlin’s use of bots and trolls to manipulate the recommendation algorithms of social media platforms is well-documented by many journalists and researchers. However pro-Kremlin manipulation of search engine algorithms has rarely been explored. We examine pro-Kremlin attempts to manipulate search engine results by comparing backlink and keyphrase networks of US, European, and Russian think tanks, as well as Kremlin-linked “pseudo” think tanks that target Western audiences.
A story of (non)compliance, bias, and conspiracies: How Google and Yandex represented Smart Voting during the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia
Mykola Makhortykh, Aleksandra Urman and Mariëlle Wijermars
On 3 September 2021, the Russian court forbade Google and Yandex to display search results for “Smart Voting,” the query referring to a tactical voting project by the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. To examine whether the two search engines complied with the court order, we collected top search outputs for the query from Google and Yandex.
COVID-19
How search engines disseminate information about COVID-19 and why they should do better
Mykola Makhortykh, Aleksandra Urman and Roberto Ulloa
Access to accurate and up-to-date information is essential for individual and collective decision making, especially at times of emergency. On February 26, 2020, two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the COVID-19’s emergency a “pandemic,” we systematically collected and analyzed search results for the term “coronavirus” in three languages from six search engines. We