Digital Gatekeeping: An Audit of Search Engine Results shows tailoring of queries on the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Íris Damião, José M. Reis, Paulo Almeida, Nuno Santos, Joana Gonçalves-Sá
TL;DR
The paper investigates how search engines tailor results for controversial topics, focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It builds privacy-preserving automated crawlers with incremental profiling across location, language, and browsing history, and compares three engines—DuckDuckGo, Google, and Yahoo—using $RBO$-based metrics. Key contributions include (i) a crawling framework that gradually increases realism, (ii) a metric suite based on $RBO$ to quantify top-result overlap and qualitative biases, and (iii) empirical evidence of substantial customization driven by geography and history, with conflict-related queries showing stronger tailoring and Yahoo showing the least personalization. These findings raise transparency and governance concerns for search engines and provide a replicable auditing approach for assessing gatekeeping and polarization in information access.
Abstract
Search engines, often viewed as reliable gateways to information, tailor search results using customization algorithms based on user preferences, location, and more. While this can be useful for routine queries, it raises concerns when the topics are sensitive or contentious, possibly limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints and increasing polarization. To examine the extent of this tailoring, we focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict and developed a privacy-protecting tool to audit the behavior of three search engines: DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo. Our study focused on two main questions: (1) How do search results for the same query about the conflict vary among different users? and (2) Are these results influenced by the user's location and browsing history? Our findings revealed significant customization based on location and browsing preferences, unlike previous studies that found only mild personalization for general topics. Moreover, queries related to the conflict were more customized than unrelated queries, and the results were not neutral concerning the conflict's portrayal.