Related papers: Does Search Engine Optimization come along with hi…
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…
In this study, we examine a collection of health-related news articles published by reliable and unreliable media outlets. Our analysis shows that there are structural, topical, and semantic differences in the way reliable and unreliable…
A focused crawler traverses the web selecting out relevant pages to a predefined topic and neglecting those out of concern. While surfing the internet it is difficult to deal with irrelevant pages and to predict which links lead to quality…
Wikipedia's perceived high quality and broad language coverage have established it as a fundamental resource in NLP. However, in recent years, such assumptions of high quality have become the subject of scrutiny in low-resource and…
Background Despite the benefits offered by an abundance of health applications promoted on app marketplaces (e.g., Google Play Store), the wide adoption of mobile health and e-health apps is yet to come. Objective This study aims to…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
A growing number of people engage in online health forums, making it important to understand the quality of the advice they receive. In this paper, we explore the role of expertise in responses provided to help-seeking posts regarding…
Google Search increasingly surfaces AI-generated content through features like AI Overviews (AIO) and Featured Snippets (FS), which users frequently rely on despite having no control over their presentation. Through a systematic algorithm…
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…
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…
Search query suggestions affect users' interactions with search engines, which then influences the information they encounter. Thus, bias in search query suggestions can lead to exposure to biased search results and can impact opinion…
In the last five years there has been a flurry of work on information extraction from clinical documents, i.e., on algorithms capable of extracting, from the informal and unstructured texts that are generated during everyday clinical…
Identifying high-quality webpages is fundamental for real-world search engines, which can fulfil users' information need with the less cognitive burden. Early studies of \emph{webpage quality assessment} usually design hand-crafted features…
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
Patients are increasingly using large language models (LLMs) to seek answers to their healthcare-related questions. However, benchmarking efforts in LLMs for question answering often focus on medical exam questions, which differ…
Web search is an integral part of our daily lives. Recently, there has been a trend of personalization in Web search, where different users receive different results for the same search query. The increasing level of personalization is…
People have a high level of trust in search engines, especially Google, but only limited knowledge of them, as numerous studies have shown. This leads to the question: To what extent is this trust justified considering the lack of…
Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…
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…
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…