SEASON2026: SEASON 2026: THE SEARCH ENGINES AND SOCIETY CONFERENCE
PROGRAM

Days: Tuesday, September 15th Wednesday, September 16th Thursday, September 17th

Tuesday, September 15th

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

08:45-09:15Coffee & Registration
09:30-10:30 Session 2: Keynote: Thomas Höppner
09:30
Impact of Search Engines on Society: Lessons from Antitrust Cases
10:00-10:30Coffee Break
10:30-11:00Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Session 3A: Track A: Political Bias & Elections
11:00
Elections in the Age of Algorithms: Evidence of Political Bias in Search Engines and Large Language Models
11:30
Using generative AI instead of search engines? Comparison and implications in the context of five state elections in Germany
12:00
Restricted (Over)view: Audit of Google's and Bing's AI summaries in the context of Swiss popular votes
11:00-12:30 Session 3B: Track B: AI Overviews & trust
11:00
On the Quality and Impact of Google’s AI Overviews
11:30
Citation Design in AI Overviews: Effects on User Reliance and Source Engagement
12:00
The Option to Search without AI: How Placing Chatbots in SERP Shapes Search Behavior and Activates Information Avoidance
12:30-13:30Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 Session 4A: Track A: Literacy & Education
13:30
Information Literacy in Conversational Search: Developing a Categorization Scheme for Measuring Information-Literate Behavior in Human-AI Interaction
14:00
Developing Critical Literacy for Entrepreneurial Practice in Digital Environment
14:30
Navigating the Impact of Generative AI on Information Seeking and Learning in Schools: Insights from Swedish Teachers and Librarians
14:45
Information Retrieval Literacy in the Age of Generative AI: Bias, Query Formulation, and Prompt Engineering​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
13:30-15:00 Session 4B: Track B: Everyday Practice & Communities
13:30
Emerging frictions: visual generative AI and the prompting practices of trans and nonbinary people
13:45
Multilingual across multiple platforms: researching the role of language in the everyday
14:00
Chatbot creep: Generative AI in the everyday information practices of young adults
14:15
Hello Donauwörth, I’m looking for…: Searching for Administrative Services on Municipal Websites vs. Google
14:30
Search Engines, AI Assistants, and Everyday Practices in Sports: Behavioral Shifts, Emotional Responses, and Privacy Cynicism among Chilean Football Fans
15:00-15:30Coffee Break
15:30-17:00 Session 5A: Track A: Health & High-Stakes Information
15:30
Think-Alouds and Results Assessment: A Study of Health Information Seeking Among People Who Use(d) Drugs
16:00
Visibility by design: Reliability of top domains in search engines for health-related queries
16:30
Generative AI search engines: cognitive authorities on climate change?
17:00-18:00 Session 6: Poster Session & Refreshments
Librarians as Catalysts for Search Literacy Education in Academic Libraries in Developing Countries
Quantifying the interdisciplinary research field of search engine studies
Presenting the SUMA-Kit toolkit
Promoting information literacy, democratic participation, and digital sovereignty: Library workshops for informed, empowered citizens
Searching for Pluralism: Bringing Search Engine Research into conversation with Media Pluralism Monitoring.
Information Access under Epistemic Uncertainty: Learning from Journalism
Enhancing Dataset Discovery in Open Government Data Portals: AI-Generated Metadata for Improved Information Access
Revealing the Hidden Success Factors of Scientific Papers: The Case of Table and Figure References.
Sounding the Horn: Designing Auditory Misinformation Warnings to Foster Critical Engagement with Podcasts
Using Think-Alouds for Search Term Collection for Search Engine Studies
Searching for the Unspeakable? Searching for the Unspeakable? Preliminary Insights from Sexual Health-Related Search Results Across Search Engines in Germany and the United States
Wednesday, September 16th

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

09:00-10:00 Session 7: Keynote: Katrin Weller
09:00
From Regulation to Research: Navigating the Digital Services Act’s Article 40 in Search Studies
10:30-12:30 Session 8A: Track A: AI answers, podcasts & behaviour
10:30
Visual Cues and Trust in AI-Generated Search Results: An Eye-Tracking Study on Google AI Overviews
10:45
Comparing Chat and Search for Engaging with News Topics
11:00
How Users Prompt Generative Search Engines for News and Political Information: An Empirical Taxonomy
11:15
Beyond Ranking Bias: Synchronous and Sequential Modes of SERP-based Relevance Assessment
10:30-12:30 Session 8B: Track B: Methods & Infrastructure
10:30
Hacking the “wicked problems” of search: A hackathon as a collaborative approach towards capturing query variability
11:00
Method Impossible? A Reflection On ​​Frangibility Of Methodologies And Infrastructures For Search Engine Research
11:30
The Infrastructures of Visual Memory
11:45
Are we being framed? Using integrative framing analysis to audit generative search engine results
12:00
Under a new archival umbrella – the investment on a national search engine and its implications for the societal role of archives
12:30-13:30Lunch Break
13:30-15:30 Session 9A: Track A: SEO, GEO & Visibility
13:30
Modeling the Impact of Search Engine Marketing on User Knowledge Gain
14:00
Semantic Multi-Cluster Coverage and LLM Citation Frequency: A Controlled Generative Engine Optimization Experiment
14:30
Will AI Overviews Reshape Media SEO Strategies? A Longitudinal Analysis of Query Segments and Search Traffic Changes
13:30-15:30 Session 9B: Track B: Critical & theoretical perspectives
13:30
Emancipatory Information Retrieval: Towards Critical IR Theories and Practices
14:00
Chatbot rodeo: a comparative interface of GPT responses exploring context windows and Rogerian psychoanalysis
14:30
Responsible Consumption as an Information and Communication Problem for Search Engines
15:00
Search Engines and Generative AI in the Cultural Imaginary
Thursday, September 17th

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

09:30-12:45 Session 12A: Track A: Workshop
09:30
Investigating Search: A Hands-on Workshop with the Investigating Search Toolkit
09:30-12:45 Session 12B: Track B: Workshops
09:30
How Search Engines Speak – a Foucauldian Framework for SERPs as Epistemological Actants
12:45-13:45Lunch Break
13:45-17:00 Session 13A: Track A: Workshop
13:45
Conducting Search Data Related Studies with the Result Assessment Tool (RAT)
13:45-17:00 Session 13B: Track B: Workshops
13:45
Dawn of the Synthetic Fog: Addressing Youth Epistemic Agency in the Age of Generative Search
15:15
Introducing Open and Reproducible Web Search for the Social Sciences