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Search engines play a central role in how people gather information, but subtle cues like headline framing may influence not only what users believe but also how they search. While framing effects on judgment are well documented, their…
The ranking incentives of many authors of Web pages play an important role in the Web dynamics. That is, authors who opt to have their pages highly ranked for queries of interest, often respond to rankings for these queries by manipulating…
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,…
In Web retrieval, there are many cases of competition between authors of Web documents: their incentive is to have their documents highly ranked for queries of interest. As such, the Web is a prominent example of a competitive search…
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).…
The Web is a canonical example of a competitive retrieval setting where many documents' authors consistently modify their documents to promote them in rankings. We present an automatic method for quality-preserving modification of document…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
Click-through data has proven to be a valuable resource for improving search-ranking quality. Search engines can easily collect click data, but biases introduced in the data can make it difficult to use the data effectively. In order to…
When we search online for content, we are constantly exposed to rankings. For example, web search results are presented as a ranking, and online bookstores often show us lists of best-selling books. While popularity-based ranking algorithms…
Currently, the quality of a search engine is often determined using so-called topical relevance, i.e., the match between the user intent (expressed as a query) and the content of the document. In this work we want to draw attention to two…
Search engines intentionally influence user behavior by picking and ranking the list of results. Users engage with the highest results both because of their prominent placement and because they are typically the most relevant documents.…
Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…
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…
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users…
Ranking algorithms are the information gatekeepers of the Internet era. We develop a stylized model to study the effects of ranking algorithms on opinion dynamics. We consider a search engine that uses an algorithm based on popularity and…
Most search engines sell slots to place advertisements on the search results page through keyword auctions. Advertisers offer bids for how much they are willing to pay when someone enters a search query, sees the search results, and then…
Search engines leverage knowledge to improve information access. In order to effectively leverage knowledge, search engines should account for context, i.e., information about the user and query. In this thesis, we aim to support search…
The search engine is tightly coupled with social networks and is primarily designed for users to acquire interested information. Specifically, the search engine assists the information dissemination for social networks, i.e., enabling users…
Contextual information in search sessions is important for capturing users' search intents. Various approaches have been proposed to model user behavior sequences to improve document ranking in a session. Typically, training samples of…
In recent years, the influence of cognitive effects and biases on users' thinking, behaving, and decision-making has garnered increasing attention in the field of interactive information retrieval. The decoy effect, one of the main…