Search Quality Complaints

Sources of failures include: the searcher, search literacy, the search engine (policy, ranking, indexing, advertising), and missing content (lack of funding, lack of expectation of being found, connected with undone science).

Related topics

search audits
data voids
null results
search and surveillance/privacy
search failures
search literacy
search repairs (see, from my dissertation, Ch. 5 Repairing Searching)
online reputation management
recency bias
search & cognition (including @sparrow2011google etc.)

Related research and writing

Carr [-@carr2008google; -@carr2010shallows]
2016 complaints from Cadwalladr [-@cadwalladr2016google; -@cadwalladr2016googleb]

Assorting reporting and writing

@sullivan2017deep
@brereton2022google
@chayka2022google
@lewis2023ruined

Research engaging with complaining

Research engaging with complaints

See also search audits for topical pages on types of complaints (sexist, racist, climate, politics, advertising, autocomplete, policies, etc.).

Research engaging with expectation

Despite public concern with the political and moral impact of search engine results, search engine providers have resisted requests to alter their content moderation practices, responding instead with explanations, directions, and assistance that place responsibility for altering search results on information providers and seekers.

This essay explores a public controversy around the results Google’s search engine returned to the query “did the holocaust happen” in order to understand how different imaginaries of the script of search contribute to the production of problematic results and shape perceptions of how to allocate responsibility for fixing it.