Abstract
Search engines are some of the most popular and profitable intelligent technologies in existence. Recent research, however, has suggested that search engines may be surprisingly dependent on user-created content like Wikipedia articles to address user information needs. In this paper, we perform a rigorous audit of the extent to which Google leverages Wikipedia and other user-generated content to respond to queries. Analyzing results for six types of important queries (e.g. most popular, trending, expensive advertising), we observe that Wikipedia appears in over 80% of results pages for some query types and is by far the most prevalent individual content source across all query types. More generally, our results provide empirical information to inform a nascent but rapidly-growing debate surrounding a highly-consequential question: Do users provide enough value to intelligent technologies that they should receive more of the economic benefits from intelligent technologies?
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages | 505-516 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2019 |
| Event | 13th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2019 - Munich, Germany Duration: Jun 11 2019 → Jun 14 2019 |
Conference
| Conference | 13th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2019 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Germany |
| City | Munich |
| Period | 6/11/19 → 6/14/19 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Networks and Communications