How does Google change what it shows you based on your age, gender, occupation, and even your political leaning? An Australian research project is tracking just that: how major search engines personalise results.
The Queensland University of Technology’s ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society has launched the Australian search experience project. Following on from a similar project run by Algorithm Watch in Germany in 2017, the project uses crowdsourced search data to allow people outside big tech companies to have insight into the decisions they’re making about search.
Most search engines use more than just the search terms when deciding what to show you, including guessing who and where you are. The impact is opaque as most search companies are tight-lipped about their algorithms but it is critically important to understand how Australians find out about the world around them.
Digital media scholar and project leader Professor Axel Bruns says there’s not a lot known about how search engines personalise information.
“Some variation might be useful,” he said. “We know that search engines personalise the information that might be available to a certain extent. For some topics that can be really problematic. If we’re both searching for vaccine information, we need to have the right information independent of who we are.”
The project asks volunteers to install a plug-in that collects data on results that search engines show you. It does this by invisibly running searches up to six times a day — on terms such as the names of political leaders or references to current events — and recording the results. It doesn’t track a user’s actual searches, just the ones performed without them knowing.
All users need to do is provide some basic details at the start — such as their age, gender and location — and let it run the background. All data collected is anonymised so it can’t be traced back to the user.
At the end of June next year, the plug-in will stop collecting data and the researchers will publish a full, public dataset. Until then, researchers will publish updates on data it obtains to understand trends in real time.
You can find out more or sign up for the project at the Australian search experience website.
If the six invisible searches per day are the same across participants, then Google will be able to identify them as test queries, and might react differently to them (just as they identify spam email addressed to gmail addresses). They’re also unlikely to be representative of the sorts of queries that each user would normally make, which could have two results: being outside the user’s history profile they might not be especially guided by that profile (perhaps that’s what the experiment wants to discover) but they might also skew the user’s history profile, so that their real future searches will be somewhat maladapted to their actual needs or interests. Doesn’t seem like a large risk, and the research could be interesting anyway. You effect the things that you observe.
Sounds interesting. Does it work if you have an ad blocker?
I use the free Ghostery and it works a treat, no ads in my gmail and very little spam which is caught anyway.
Failing a VPN, try searching using the private window and the results can’t be based on your history.
For over a decade now those involved in digital marketing, especially SEO search engine optimisation that endeavours to have a website appear on first page of organic search results, requires collective inference of the search algorithms (mix of guessing, gaming, and panic when they change). Further, if you search while logged in to Google versus logged out, the results will be different.
While we’re on the subject or search and navigability, it’d great if Crikey allowed URLs like https://uat.crikey.com.au/2021/07/27, just like most other blogs using the execrable WordPress. Then one could see all the posts from a particular day, including those that didn’t show up on the front page, without having to trawl through all the categories for articles you wouldn’t otherwise have known you missed.