Related papers: Methods for comparing rankings of search engine re…
The search engine evaluation research has quite a lot metrics available to it. Only recently, the question of the significance of individual metrics started being raised, as these metrics' correlations to real-world user experiences or…
Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search,…
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…
Many people use search engines to find online guidance to solve computer or mobile device problems. Users frequently encounter challenges in identifying effective solutions from search results, often wasting time trying ineffective…
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…
Comparing the top $k$ elements between two or more ranked results is a common task in many contexts and settings. A few measures have been proposed to compare top $k$ lists with attractive mathematical properties, but they face a number of…
Conversational search systems, such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, enable users to interact with search systems in multiple rounds through natural language dialogues. Evaluating such systems is very challenging given that any…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
This study examines the influence of Google's search algorithm on news diversity by analyzing search results in Brazil, the UK, and the US. It explores how Google's system preferentially favors a limited number of news outlets. Utilizing…
Skyline and ranking queries are two of the most used tools to manage large data sets. The former is based on non-dominance, while the latter on a scoring function. Despite their effectiveness, they have some drawbacks like the result size…
Full-text search engines are important tools for information retrieval. In a proximity full-text search, a document is relevant if it contains query terms near each other, especially if the query terms are frequently occurring words. For…
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…
Search engines play an important role in the context of modern elections. By curating information in response to user queries, search engines influence how individuals are informed about election-related developments and perceive the media…
In this paper, we address the problem of evaluating whether results served by an e-commerce search engine for a query are good or not. This is a critical question in evaluating any e-commerce search engine. While this question is…
In this work, we aim to investigate the impact of location (different countries) on bias in search results. For this, we use the search results of Google and Bing in the UK and US locations. The query set is composed of controversial…
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…
Rank similarity measures provide a method for quantifying differences between search engine results without the need for relevance judgments. For example, the providers of a search service might use such measures to estimate the impact of a…
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…
Time is an important relevance signal when searching streams of social media posts. The distribution of document timestamps from the results of an initial query can be leveraged to infer the distribution of relevant documents, which can…
How to rank web pages, scientists and online resources has recently attracted increasing attention from both physicists and computer scientists. In this paper, we study the ranking problem of rating systems where users vote objects by…