Related papers: Public awareness and attitudes towards search engi…
A large share of all online display advertisements (ads) are never seen by a human. For instance, an ad could appear below the page fold, where a user never scrolls. Yet, an ad is essentially ineffective if it is not at least somewhat…
Users rely on search engines for information in critical contexts, such as public health emergencies. Understanding how users evaluate the trustworthiness of search results is therefore essential. Research has identified rank and the…
This study examined how AI-generated summaries, which have become visually prominent in online search results, affect how users think about different issues. In a preregistered randomized controlled experiment, participants (N = 2,004)…
We consider the problem of personalization of online services from the viewpoint of ad targeting, where we seek to find the best ad categories to be shown to each user, resulting in improved user experience and increased advertisers'…
Sponsored search becomes an easy platform to match potential consumers' intent with merchants' advertising. Advertisers express their willingness to pay for each keyword in terms of bids to the search engine. When a user's query matches the…
A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia's volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of millions of people. In this paper, we report…
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…
Search engines are used and trusted by hundreds of millions of people every day. However, the algorithms used by search engines to index, filter, and rank web content are inherently biased, and will necessarily prefer some views and…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can benefit from useful experiences to improve their performance on specific tasks. However, finding helpful experiences for different LLMs is not obvious, since it is unclear what experiences suit specific…
Survey-based studies suggest that search engines are trusted more than social media or even traditional news, although cases of false information or defamation are known. In this study, we analyze query suggestion features of three search…
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…
Online advertising has been the major monetization approach for Internet companies. Advertisers invest budgets to bid for real-time impressions to gain direct and indirect returns. Existing works have been concentrating on optimizing direct…
The rapid adoption of generative AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini is fundamentally reshaping information retrieval, moving from traditional ranked lists to synthesized, citation-backed answers. This shift…
The internet has been blurring the lines between local and global cultures, affecting in different ways the perception of people about themselves and others. In the global context of the internet, search engine platforms are a key mediator…
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…
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,…
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…
Political advertising on social media has become a central element in election campaigns. However, granular information about political advertising on social media was previously unavailable, thus raising concerns regarding fairness,…