Searching for politics: Using real-world web search behavior and surveys to see political information searching in context

Abstract

Search engines are one of the most trusted and used sources of political information. Yet there is limited research on how often people search for political topics in the real world, the search strategies they use to find information, and the results people select. We use a combination of survey and online behavioral data to illuminate how often people search for political content, what queries they use, how autocomplete affects political queries, how searches vary by political characteristics, and what types of results people view. We holistically investigate the political search process of 45 politically diverse individuals in the U.S., selected from a larger sample of 564, by observing 6-months of their online behavior. While politically interested people do most political searching and tend to favor their own side in the queries they compose and the results they visit, it is not overwhelmingly so. In fact, there is a substantial amount of cross-party searching and result visiting. Autocomplete and trending topics play a small role in political search overall. People visit a wide variety of results after searching for political information beyond national news sites. These findings extend our understanding of political search and have both theoretical and practical implications.