Case Study: The Impact of Location on Bias in Search Results

Abstract: In this work, we aim to investigate the impact of location (different countries) on bias in search results. For this, we use the search results of Google and Bing in the UK and US locations. The query set is composed of controversial queries obtained from ProCon.org that have specific ideological leanings as conservative or liberal. In a previous work, researchers analyse search results in terms of stance and ideological bias with rank and relevance based measures. Yet, in the scope of this work, by using the query subset of controversial queries we examine the effect of location on the existence of bias as well as the magnitude of bias difference between Bing and Google. Note that this study follows a similar evaluation procedure. Our preliminary results show that location might affect the retrieval performance of search engines as well as the bias in the search results returned by Bing and Google towards the controversial queries.