Information Processing & Management ( IF 8.6 ) Pub Date : 2021-06-11 , DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102654 Monica Lestari Paramita 1 , Kalia Orphanou 2 , Evgenia Christoforou 3 , Jahna Otterbacher 2, 3 , Frank Hopfgartner 1
During times of crisis, information access is crucial. Given the opaque processes behind modern search engines, it is important to understand the extent to which the “picture” of the Covid-19 pandemic accessed by users differs. We explore variations in what users “see” concerning the pandemic through Google image search, using a two-step approach. First, we crowdsource a search task to users in four regions of Europe, asking them to help us create a photo documentary of Covid-19 by providing image search queries. Analysing the queries, we find five common themes describing information needs. Next, we study three sources of variation – users’ information needs, their geo-locations and query languages – and analyse their influences on the similarity of results. We find that users see the pandemic differently depending on where they live, as evidenced by the 46% similarity across results. When users expressed a given query in different languages, there was no overlap for most of the results. Our analysis suggests that localisation plays a major role in the (dis)similarity of results, and provides evidence of the diverse “picture” of the pandemic seen through Google.
中文翻译:
你看见我看到的了吗?Google 镜头下的 COVID-19 大流行图像
在危机时期,信息访问至关重要。鉴于现代搜索引擎背后的不透明过程,了解用户访问的 Covid-19 大流行“图片”的不同程度非常重要。我们使用两步法探索用户通过谷歌图像搜索“看到”的关于大流行病的变化。首先,我们将搜索任务众包给欧洲四个地区的用户,请他们通过提供图像搜索查询来帮助我们制作 Covid-19 的照片纪录片。通过分析查询,我们发现了五个描述信息需求的共同主题。接下来,我们研究了三个变化来源——用户的信息需求、他们的地理位置和查询语言——并分析了它们对结果相似性的影响。我们发现用户对大流行的看法因居住地而异,结果之间 46% 的相似性证明了这一点。当用户用不同的语言表达给定的查询时,大多数结果都没有重叠。我们的分析表明,本地化在结果的(不)相似性方面起着重要作用,并提供了通过谷歌看到的大流行的不同“图片”的证据。