Related papers: Intriguing behavior when testing the impact of quo…
People use search engines to find answers to questions related to their health, finances, or other socially relevant issues. However, most users are unaware that search results are considerably influenced by search engine marketing (SEM).…
There is a growing body of research which has investigated relevance judgment in IR being influenced by multiple factors or dimensions. At the same time, the Order Effects in sequential decision making have been quantitatively detected and…
Search engine retrieval effectiveness studies are usually small-scale, using only limited query samples. Furthermore, queries are selected by the researchers. We address these issues by taking a random representative sample of 1,000…
Opinionated users often seek information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs while dismissing contradictory evidence due to confirmation bias. This conduct hinders their ability to consider alternative stances when searching the web.…
In essence, embedding algorithms work by optimizing the distance between a word and its usual context in order to generate an embedding space that encodes the distributional representation of words. In addition to single words or word…
Benford's Law predicts that the first significant digit on the leftmost side of numbers in real-life data is proportioned between all possible 1 to 9 digits approximately as in LOG(1 + 1/digit), so that low digits occur much more frequently…
We examine how six search engines filter and rank information in relation to the queries on the U.S. 2020 presidential primary elections under the default - that is nonpersonalized - conditions. For that, we utilize an algorithmic auditing…
We conduct a comparative analysis of desktop web search behaviour of users from Germany (n=558) and Switzerland (n=563) based on a combination of web tracking and survey data. We find that web search accounts for 13% of all desktop…
Benford's law states that the occurrence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but tends to follow a logarithmic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger…
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
This article presents results of experimental studies the effectiveness of the genetic algorithm that was applied to effective queries creation and relevant document selection. Studies were carried out to the comparative analysis of the…
A random variable (r.v.) X is said to follow Benford's law if log(X) is uniform mod 1. Many experimental data sets prove to follow an approximate version of it, and so do many mathematical series and continuous random variables. This…
Information availability affects people's behavior and perception of the world. Notably, people rely on search engines to satisfy their need for information. Search engines deliver results relevant to user requests usually without being or…
Is Google Search a monopoly with gatekeeping power? Regulators from the US, UK, and Europe have argued that it is based on the assumption that Google Search dominates the market for horizontal (a.k.a. "general") web search. Google disputes…
Benford's law states that many data sets have a bias towards lower leading digits (about $30\%$ are 1s). There are numerous applications, from designing efficient computers to detecting tax, voter and image fraud. It's important to know…
Benford's Law is an empirical law which predicts the frequency of significant digits in databases corresponding to various phenomena, natural or artificial. Although counter intuitive at the first sight, it predicts a higher occurrence of…
Search engines play a central role in routing political information to citizens. The algorithmic personalization of search results by large search engines like Google implies that different users may be offered systematically different…
Recently, light has been shed on the trend of personalization, which comes into play whenever different search results are being tailored for a group of users who have issued the same search query. The unpalatable fact that myriads of…
Search is an integral part of a software development process. Developers often use search engines to look for information during development, including reusable code snippets, API understanding, and reference examples. Developers tend to…
The QWERTY effect postulates that the keyboard layout influences word meanings by linking positivity to the use of the right hand and negativity to the use of the left hand. For example, previous research has established that words with…