China’s Digital Nationalism: Search Engines and Online Encyclopedias

S. Geiss Birgit Stark M. Steiner + 1 lainnya

24 Juni 2020

ABSTRACT Search engines are important political news sources and should thus provide users with diverse political information – an important precondition of a well-informed citizenry. The search engines’ algorithmic content selection strongly influences the diversity of the content received by the users – particularly since most users highly trust search engines and often click on only the first result. A widespread concern is that users are not informed diversely by search engines, but how far this concern applies has hardly been investigated. Our study is the first to investigate content diversity provided by five search engines on ten current political issues in Germany. The findings show that sometimes even the first result is highly diverse, but in most cases, more results must be considered to be informed diversely. This unreliability presents a serious challenge when using search engines as political news sources. Our findings call for media policy measures, for example in terms of algorithmic transparency.

Aleksandra Urman R. Ulloa M. Makhortykh

4 Oktober 2021

By filtering and ranking information, search engines shape how individuals perceive both the present and past events. However, these information curation mechanisms are prone to malperformance that can misinform their users. In this article, we examine how search malperformance can influence representation of traumatic past by investigating image search outputs of six search engines in relation to the Holocaust in English and Russian. Our findings indicate that besides two common themes - commemoration and liberation of camps - there is substantial variation in visual representation of the Holocaust between search engines and languages. We also observe several instances of search malperformance, including content propagating antisemitism and Holocaust denial, misattributed images, and disproportionate visibility of specific Holocaust aspects that might result in its distorted perception by the public.

Aleksandra Urman R. Ulloa M. Makhortykh

11 Mei 2020

Access to accurate and up-to-date information is essential for individual and collective decision making, especially at times of emergency. On February 26, 2020, two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the COVID-19’s emergency a “pandemic,” we systematically collected and analyzed search results for the term “coronavirus” in three languages from six search engines. We found that different search engines prioritize specific categories of information sources, such as government-related websites or alternative media. We also observed that source ranking within the same search engine is subjected to randomization, which can result in unequal access to information among users.

Kunfeng Liu Jinchao Zhang Xianjin Zha + 2 lainnya

10 Juni 2021

Purpose Digital libraries and academic search engines have developed as two important online scholarly information sources with different features. The purpose of this study is to compare digital libraries and academic search engines from the perspective of the dual-route model. Design/methodology/approach Research hypotheses were developed. Potential participants were recruited to answer an online survey distributing at Chinese social media out of which 251 responses were deemed to be valid and used for data analysis. The paired samples t-test was used to compare the means. Findings Both information quality (central route) and source credibility (peripheral route) of digital libraries are significantly higher than those of academic search engines, while there is no significant difference between digital libraries and academic search engines in terms of affinity (peripheral route). Practical implications In the digital information society, the important status of digital libraries as conventional information sources should be spread by necessary measures. Academic search engines can act as complementary online information sources for seeking academic information rather than the substitute for digital libraries. Practitioners of digital libraries should value the complementary role of academic search engines and encourage users to use academic search engines while emphasizing the importance of digital libraries as conventional information sources. Originality/value According to the dual-route model, this study compares digital libraries and academic search engines in terms of information quality, source credibility and affinity, which the authors believe presents a new lens for digital libraries research and practice alike.

O. Sundin Jutta Haider D. Lewandowski

21 Agustus 2021

This opinion piece takes Google's response to the so‐called COVID‐19 infodemic, as a starting point to argue for the need to consider societal relevance as a complement to other types of relevance. The authors maintain that if information science wants to be a discipline at the forefront of research on relevance, search engines, and their use, then the information science research community needs to address itself to the challenges and conditions that commercial search engines create in. The article concludes with a tentative list of related research topics.