Dynamics in Search Engine Query Suggestions for European Politicians

2024-05-21

Web Science Conference

AI Summary

This study investigates the dynamic variation of Google search suggestions for European political figures across countries and over time, and how these variations reflect differences in public interest. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset spanning ten countries, the research integrates large-scale data collection, time series analysis, cross-national comparison, and natural language processing to systematically uncover, for the first time, how a politician’s nationality, gender, and hierarchical position influence the stability of their search suggestions and cross-country consistency. The findings reveal that search suggestions for domestic politicians, those holding supranational offices, and women tend to be less stable, whereas suggestions for political leaders and male politicians exhibit greater consistency across countries.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Search

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Search engines are commonly used for online political information seeking. Yet, it remains unclear how search query suggestions for political searches that reflect the latent interest of internet users vary across countries and over time. We provide a systematic analysis of Google search engine query suggestions for European and national politicians. Using an original dataset of search query suggestions for European politicians collected in ten countries, we find that query suggestions are less stable over time in politicians’ countries of origin, when the politicians hold a supranational role, and for female politicians. Moreover, query suggestions for political leaders and male politicians are more similar across countries. We conclude by discussing possible future directions for studying information search about European politicians in online search.

Problem

• search engine query suggestions
• European politicians
• online political information seeking
• cross-country variation
• temporal dynamics

Innovation

• search engine query suggestions
• political information seeking
• cross-national comparison
• temporal dynamics
• gender differences