Related papers: Domain-specific queries and Web search personaliza…
If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues like rising political polarization. This concern is central to the echo chamber and filter…
This report aims to report my thesis progress so far. My work attempts to show the differences in the perspectives of two search engines, Bing and Google on several selected controversial topics. In this work, we try to make a distinction…
The Web is an important resource for understanding and diagnosing medical conditions. Based on exposure to online content, people may develop undue health concerns, believing that common and benign symptoms are explained by serious…
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…
Search engines have vast technical capabilities to retain Internet search logs for each user and thus present major privacy vulnerabilities to both individuals and organizations in revealing user intent. Additionally, many of the web search…
Personalized recommendations on the Netflix Homepage are based on a user's viewing habits and the behavior of similar users. These recommendations, organized for efficient browsing, enable users to discover the next great video to watch and…
Some of the main ranking features of today's search engines reflect result popularity and are based on ranking models, such as PageRank, implicit feedback aggregation, and more. While such features yield satisfactory results for a wide…
Information is transmitted through websites, and immediate reactions to various kinds of information are required. Hence, efforts by users to select information themselves have increased, which is fueling further improvements in…
Conversational search offers an easier and faster alternative to conventional web search, while having downsides like lack of source verification. Research has examined performance disparities between these two systems in different…
Despite recent widespread deployment of differential privacy, relatively little is known about what users think of differential privacy. In this work, we seek to explore users' privacy expectations related to differential privacy.…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
The role of recommendation algorithms in online user confinement is at the heart of a fast-growing literature. Recent empirical studies generally suggest that filter bubbles may principally be observed in the case of explicit recommendation…
We address the problem of personalization in the context of eCommerce search. Specifically, we develop personalization ranking features that use in-session context to augment a generic ranker optimized for conversion and relevance. We use a…
Search engines play a crucial role in shaping public discourse by influencing how information is accessed and framed. While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias -- such as content prioritization,…
The evolution of information-seeking processes, driven by search engines like Google, has transformed the access to information people have. This paper investigates how individuals' preexisting attitudes influence the modern…
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…
In the process of information gathering on the web, confirmation bias is known to exist, exemplified in phenomena such as echo chambers and filter bubbles. Our purpose is to reveal how people consume news and discuss these phenomena. In web…
Search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing are an excellent support for finding documents, but this strength also imposes a limitation. As they are optimized for document retrieval tasks, they perform less well when it comes to more complex…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
Asking clarifying questions in response to search queries has been recognized as a useful technique for revealing the underlying intent of the query. Clarification has applications in retrieval systems with different interfaces, from the…