Auditing Source Diversity Bias in Video Search Results Using Virtual Agents
This work addresses potential bias in search engine results for users and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing auditing methods.
The study audited source diversity bias in video search results across different search engines and languages, finding that English queries yield more diverse sources than Russian ones and revealing a disproportionate dominance of YouTube in Western search engines except Google, where competitors like Vimeo or Dailymotion were absent, suggesting potential own-content bias.
We audit the presence of domain-level source diversity bias in video search results. Using a virtual agent-based approach, we compare outputs of four Western and one non-Western search engines for English and Russian queries. Our findings highlight that source diversity varies substantially depending on the language with English queries returning more diverse outputs. We also find disproportionately high presence of a single platform, YouTube, in top search outputs for all Western search engines except Google. At the same time, we observe that Youtube's major competitors such as Vimeo or Dailymotion do not appear in the sampled Google's video search results. This finding suggests that Google might be downgrading the results from the main competitors of Google-owned Youtube and highlights the necessity for further studies focusing on the presence of own-content bias in Google's search results.