A Study of Web Search Engine Bias and its Assessment

Search engine bias has been seriously noticed in recent years. Several pioneering studies have reported that bias perceivably exists even with respect to the URLs in the search results. On the other hand, the potential bias with respect to the content of the search results has not been comprehensively studied. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional approach to assess both the indexical bias and content bias existing in the search results. Statistical analyses have been further performed to present the significance of bias assessment. The results show that the content bias and indexical bias are both influential in the bias assessment, and they complement each other to provide a panoramic view with the two-dimensional representation.