Towards improving user awareness of search engine biases: A participatory design approach

Monica Lestari Paramita, Maria Kasinidou, Styliani Kleanthous, Paolo Rosso, Tsvi Kuflik, Frank Hopfgartner

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Bias in news search engines has been shown to influence users' perceptions of a news topic and contribute to the polarisation of society. As a result, there is a need for news search engines that increase user awareness of biases in the search results. While technical approaches have been developed to mitigate biases in search, very few studies have investigated user preferences in interface designs for potentially raising their awareness of biases in news search engines. In this study, we utilized a participatory design methodology to develop eight prototypes with different features that could potentially be used to raise user awareness of biases in news search engines. We conducted three user studies, involving 132 participants with Computer Science backgrounds, to evaluate these prototypes. Our findings indicate the importance of news search engines that (a) inform users of possible biases in the results (bias visualization approach) and (b) allow users to access alternative search results (results-reranking approach). Our study provides further insights into the strengths and possible risks of each approach, which are important for future research on designing interfaces for raising user awareness of biases in news search engines.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)581-599
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Volume75
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Association for Information Science and Technology.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Library and Information Sciences

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