Search as News Curator

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm audit of the Google Top Stories box, a prominent component of search engine results and powerful driver of traffic to news publishers. As such, it is important in shaping user attention towards news outlets and topics. By analyzing the number of appearances of news article links we contribute a series of novel analyses that provide an in-depth characterization of news source diversity and its implications for attention via Google search. We present results indicating a considerable degree of source concentration (with variation among search terms), a slight exaggeration in the ideological skew of news in comparison to a baseline, and a quantification of how the presentation of items translates into traffic and attention for publishers. We contribute insights that underscore the power that Google wields in exposing users to diverse news information, and raise important questions and opportunities for future work on algorithmic news curation.

Auditing Source Diversity Bias in Video Search Results Using Virtual Agents

“…3 suggest that search engines feature different arrays of domains -with the exception of Youtube -in search results. Google tends to retrieve results from legacy media in both Russian and English more frequently than other search engines, a finding in line with the previous research [7,31,32]. Other search engines also include some legacy media, though to a lower extent than Google, as well as social media (e.g., Ok.ru, Facebook.com), and several video portals that are Youtube's competitors -Dailymotion, Vimeo and Rutube.…”

“…To date, source diversity bias has been primarily investigated in the context of text search results [7,31,32] with the focus exclusively on one engine -Google. At the same time, few comparative studies that were conducted highlight substantial cross-engine differences in search diversity bias levels [18,23,34].…”

Codes of conduct for algorithmic news recommendation: The Yandex.News controversy in Russia

“…This research provides a case study of "governance by algorithms" (Musiani, 2013;Just and Latzer, 2017; see also Gillespie, 2018), and contributes to understanding how news recommendation systems can be prone to certain biases (Kulshrestha, et al, 2019;Trielli and Diakopoulos, 2019) or may be susceptible to political filtering in subtle ways (Jiang, 2014). The Yandex case also provides insights into the specificities of Russian Internet policy as an assertion of "digital sovereignty" (Nocetti, 2015;Musiani, et al, 2019).…”

Safeguarding the Journalistic DNA: Attitudes towards the Role of Professional Values in Algorithmic News Recommender Designs

“…Van Den Bulck and Moe 2018 ; Bodó 2018 , 2019 ; Diakopoulos 2019a ). Consequently, there is still a shortage of comparative studies looking specifically at the relationship between journalistic values and the deployment of AI-driven innovations, in particular for news distribution, compared to the larger body of research looking at personalized content delivery in the context of news aggregators (Nechushtai and Lewis 2019 ; Bandy and Diakopoulos 2020 ), search engines (Unkel & Haim, 2019 ; Trielli and Diakopoulos 2019 ), or social media platforms (Schmidt et al. 2019 ).…”

“… 2 Despite a growing number of studies looking at the interactions between personalized information delivery and editorial values, most of these studies focus on non-journalistic organizations such as Google News (Haim, Graefe, and Brosius 2018 ; Nechushtai and Lewis 2019 ), Apple News (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020 ) or Google search (Trielli and Diakopoulos 2019 ). By contrast, the relationship between ANRs and practitioners’ values in the context of traditional media is approached by only a few studies so far (e.g.…”