Amicus Curiae Brief to the Russian Constitutional Court on the Right to be Forgotten

How Google Autocomplete Algorithms about Conspiracy Theorists Mislead the Public

We audit the presence of domain-level source diversity bias in video search\nresults. Using a virtual agent-based approach, we compare outputs of four\nWestern and one non-Western search engines for English and Russian queries. Our\nfindings highlight that source diversity varies substantially depending on the\nlanguage with English queries returning more diverse outputs. We also find\ndisproportionately high presence of a single platform, YouTube, in top search\noutputs for all Western search engines except Google. At the same time, we\nobserve that Youtube's major competitors such as Vimeo or Dailymotion do not\nappear in the sampled Google's video search results. This finding suggests that\nGoogle might be downgrading the results from the main competitors of\nGoogle-owned Youtube and highlights the necessity for further studies focusing\non the presence of own-content bias in Google's search results.\n

Google has become, for the majority of Americans, the index of choice for online information. Through dynamically generated results pages keyed to a near-infinite variety of search terms, Google steers our thoughts and our learning online. It tells us what words mean, what things look like, where to buy things, and who and what is most important to us. Google's control over results constitutes an awesome ability to set the course of human knowledge. As this paper will explain, fortunes are won and lost based on Google's results pages, including the fortunes of Google itself. Because Google's results are so significant to e-commerce activities today, they have already been the subject of substantial litigation. Today's courtroom disputes over Google's results are based primarily, though not exclusively, in claims about the requirements of trademark law. This paper will argue that the most powerful trademark doctrines shaping these cases, initial interest confusion and trademark use, are not up to the task they have been given, but that trademark law must continue to stay engaged with Google's results. The current application of initial interest confusion to search results represents a hyper-extension of trademark law past the point of its traditional basis in preventing consumer confusion. Courts should reject initial interest confusion doctrine due to its tendency to grant trademark owners rights over search results that could easily operate against the greater public interest. On the other hand, the recent innovation of trademark use doctrine improperly relieves trademark law of any role in the supervision of the shape of Google's search results. The absence of any state involvement in the shape Google's results will effectively cede the structure of our primary online index to Google's law. Google may enjoy substantial public goodwill, but what is best for Google will not always be what is best for society. Part I of this article describes the history of Google and its business model. Google is not the only search engine today, but it is the leading search engine in terms of United States market share. Additionally, Google is playing the most important role today in search engine litigation. It is a unique search engine in many respects. During its evolution, Google followed a very different path than many of its competitors. Today its competitors are largely imitating its model, yet are unable to dethrone its centrality in search. Understanding how Google rose to prominence is essential to understanding its motives and how it might act in the future. Part II of this article sets forth the contemporary law pertaining to search results. It begins with a short discussion of recent (failed) attempts to regulate Google's results through laws other than trademark. It then describes current theories of trademark law. It concludes by summarizing how trademark law has been applied to search engines, starting with early meta tag cases and concluding with Google's current attempts to insulate itself from liability under an expanded doctrine of trademark use. Part III criticizes the current application of trademark law to search engines. It argues that the judicial innovations of both initial interest confusion and trademark use are inconsistent with the traditional purpose of trademark law and the new realities of the e-commerce marketplace. It concludes that a simple focus on the likelihood of confusion standard, which some courts have already supported, is overdue. It concludes by explaining why, despite the fact that trademark law today will likely permit Google's current practices, Google's bid for the carte blanche freedom permitted by trademark use doctrine should be rejected by courts. In its relatively new role as a protector of the social value of indices, trademark law must retain the ability to curb potential abuses of the commercial power enjoyed by Google.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

A crucial component of the analysis of shotgun proteomics datasets is the search engine, an algorithm that attempts to identify the peptide sequence from the parent molecular ion that produced each fragment ion spectrum in the dataset. There are many different search engines, both commercial and open source, each employing a somewhat different technique for spectrum identification. The set of high-scoring peptide-spectrum matches for a defined set of input spectra differs markedly among the various search engine results; individual engines each provide unique correct identifications among a core set of correlative identifications. This has led to the approach of combining the results from multiple search engines to achieve improved analysis of each dataset. Here we review the techniques and available software for combining the results of multiple search engines and briefly compare the relative performance of these techniques.

Autism On the Web: “Oh, the Places You'll Go!”

La pratique croissante de la recherche payee au sein de l'industrie des moteurs de recherche du Web remet en cause des valeurs ethiques tenues pour vitales dans une societe democratique : la liberte par rapport aux partis pris, la vie privee et la confiance. La protection de ces valeurs n'est pas incompatible avec les objectifs de la recherche payee et doit etre integree des la conception.

BackgroundIllegal online pharmacies function as affiliate networks, in which search engine results pages (SERPs) are poisoned by several links redirecting site visitors to unlicensed drug distribution pages upon clicking on the link of a legitimate, yet irrelevant domain. This unfair online marketing practice is commonly referred to as search redirection attack, a most frequently used technique in the online illegal pharmaceutical marketplace.ObjectiveThis study is meant to describe the mechanism of search redirection attacks in Google search results in relation to erectile dysfunction medications in European countries and also to determine the local and global scales of this problem.MethodsThe search engine query results regarding 4 erectile dysfunction medications were documented using Google. The search expressions were “active ingredient” and “buy” in the language of 12 European countries, including Hungary. The final destination website legitimacy was checked at LegitScript, and the estimated number of monthly unique visitors was obtained from SEMrush traffic analytics. Compromised links leading to international illegal medicinal product vendors via redirection were analyzed using Gephi graph visualization software.ResultsCompromised links redirecting to active online pharmacies were present in search query results of all evaluated countries. The prevalence was highest in Spain (62/160, 38.8%), Hungary (52/160, 32.5%), Italy (46/160, 28.8%), and France (37/160, 23.1%), whereas the lowest was in Finland (12/160, 7.5%), Croatia (10/160, 6.3%), and Bulgaria (2/160, 1.3%), as per data recorded in November 2020. A decrease in the number of compromised sites linking visitors to illegitimate medicine sellers was observed in the Hungarian data set between 2019 and 2021, from 41% (33/80) to 5% (4/80), respectively. Out of 1920 search results in the international sample, 380 (19.79%) search query results were compromised, with the majority (n=342, 90%) of links redirecting individuals to 73 international illegal medicinal product vendors. Most of these illegal online pharmacies (41/73, 56%) received only 1 or 2 compromised links, whereas the top 3 domains with the highest in-degree link value received more than one-third of all incoming links. Traffic analysis of 35 pharmacy specific domains, accessible via compromised links in search engine queries, showed a total of 473,118 unique visitors in November 2020.ConclusionsAlthough the number of compromised links in SERPs has shown a decreasing tendency in Hungary, an analysis of the European search query data set points to the global significance of search engine poisoning. Our research illustrates that search engine poisoning is a constant threat, as illegitimate affiliate networks continue to flourish while uncoordinated interventions by authorities and individual stakeholders remain insufficient. Ultimately, without a dedicated and comprehensive effort on the part of search engine providers for effectively monitoring and moderating SERPs, they may never be entirely free of compromised links leading to illegal online pharmacy networks.

Search engines are among the most popular online services used in a range of contexts, including to find information on political issues. As such, they increasingly act as powerful mediators between news organizations and their audiences. The claim that search results are politically biased, while hardly new, has also recently received fresh support from President Donald Trump, who has blamed Google for unfairly prioritizing news outlets critical of his policies. In the context of elections, search engines may serve to inform citizens and have been argued to sway the choices of undecided voters. I examine two related issues: How political parties and candidates are represented in Google Search results and how strongly results in both Google Search and Google News are personalized in the run up to the 2017 German general elections. My results suggest that some parties and candidates are able to exert greater influence over how they are represented in search results than others, through a combination of local branch websites and social media presences. I furthermore find only a small share of results which differ from the mainstream, while controlling for time, language, and location, calling into question the validity of the filter bubble concept.

To cope with the immense amount of content on the web, search engines often use complex algorithms to personalize search results for individual users. However, personalization of search results has led to worries about the Filter Bubble Effect, where the personalization algorithm decides that some useful information is irrelevant to the user, and thus prevents them from locating it. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to explore the impact of location-based personalization on Google Search results. Assessing the relationship between location and personalization is crucial, since users' geolocation can be used as a proxy for other demographic traits, like race, income, educational attainment, and political affiliation. In other words, does location-based personalization trap users in geolocal Filter Bubbles?Using our methodology, we collected 30 days of search results from Google Search in response to 240 different queries. By comparing search results gathered from 59 GPS coordinates around the US at three different granularities (county, state, and national), we are able to observe that differences in search results due to personalization grow as physical distance increases. However these differences are highly dependent on what a user searches for: queries for local establishments receive 4-5 different results per page, while more general terms exhibit essentially no personalization.

Googling for Health Information

Search engine results pages (SERPs) commonly organize online search results in a list-based format. Various viewing formats have been suggested to improve search effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction. However, except for the Knowledge Graph view, which is based on semantic search and appears as information boxes on the SERP, those views are rarely implemented in popular Web search engines. This study investigates the effect of three viewing formats (list, Google Knowledge Graph, and clustered list) on user performance and satisfaction when performing five common types of search tasks mapped in previous studies (navigate, find-simple, find-complex, locate/acquire, and explore/learn). A Chrome extension we developed is used to enable clustering on Google search results. While overall effectiveness was similar across viewing formats, efficiency and satisfaction varied significantly depending on the search task. The operative implication is that search engine viewing formats should adapt to the specific search task.

Product visualization is able to help users easily get knowledge about the visual appearance of a product. It is useful in many application and commercialization scenarios. However, the existing product image search on e-commerce Web sites or general search engines usually get insufficient search results or return images that are redundant and not relevant enough. In this article, we present a novel product visualization approach that automatically collects a set of diverse and relevant product images by exploring multiple Web sources. Our approach simultaneously leverages Amazon and Google image search engines, which represent domain-specific knowledge resource and general Web information collection, respectively. We propose a conditional clustering approach that is formulated as an affinity propagation problem regarding the Amazon examples as information prior. The ranking information of Google image search results is also explored. In this way, a set of exemplars can be found from the Google search results and they are provided together with the Amazon example images for product visualization. Experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.

BackgroundThe Internet has become one of the most important means to obtain health and medical information. It is often the first step in checking for basic information about a disease and its treatment. The search results are often useful to general users. Various search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com can play an important role in obtaining medical information for both medical professionals and lay people. However, the usability and effectiveness of various search engines for medical information have not been comprehensively compared and evaluated.ObjectiveTo compare major Internet search engines in their usability of obtaining medical and health information.MethodsWe applied usability testing as a software engineering technique and a standard industry practice to compare the four major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com) in obtaining health and medical information. For this purpose, we searched the keyword breast cancer in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com and saved the results of the top 200 links from each search engine. We combined nonredundant links from the four search engines and gave them to volunteer users in an alphabetical order. The volunteer users evaluated the websites and scored each website from 0 to 10 (lowest to highest) based on the usefulness of the content relevant to breast cancer. A medical expert identified six well-known websites related to breast cancer in advance as standards. We also used five keywords associated with breast cancer defined in the latest release of Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) and analyzed their occurrence in the websites.ResultsEach search engine provided rich information related to breast cancer in the search results. All six standard websites were among the top 30 in search results of all four search engines. Google had the best search validity (in terms of whether a website could be opened), followed by Bing, Ask.com, and Yahoo!. The search results highly overlapped between the search engines, and the overlap between any two search engines was about half or more. On the other hand, each search engine emphasized various types of content differently. In terms of user satisfaction analysis, volunteer users scored Bing the highest for its usefulness, followed by Yahoo!, Google, and Ask.com.ConclusionsGoogle, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com are by and large effective search engines for helping lay users get health and medical information. Nevertheless, the current ranking methods have some pitfalls and there is room for improvement to help users get more accurate and useful information. We suggest that search engine users explore multiple search engines to search different types of health information and medical knowledge for their own needs and get a professional consultation if necessary.

Blaming the victim: disability hate crime