FAIR-SE: Framework for Analyzing Information Disparities in Search Engines with Diverse LLM-Generated Personas

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Search engine personalization, while enhancing user satisfaction, can lead to information disparities. Previous studies on this topic face limitations, such as the absence of context-aware data collection, superficial URL-level analysis, and human-dependent annotations. We propose FAIR-SE, a Framework for Analyzing Information dispaRities in Search Engines that addresses these challenges through AWS Lambda-based concurrent data collection and LLM-generated persona-based content analysis. We collected search results across four user contexts (Search History, Geo-location, Language Preference, and Access Environment) and analyzed them through four analytical perspectives (Political Leaning, Topic-specific Stance, Subjectivity, and Bias). Experiments conducted on two globally prominent search engines across nine controversial topics demonstrate the efficacy of FAIR-SE regarding benchmark accuracy, persona consistency, and ability to reflect real-world discourse patterns across diverse topics. Our statistical analysis identifies distinct search engine characteristics and demonstrates significant information disparities in our case studies examining regional disparities in search results. Our code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/bigbases/FAIR-SE.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCIKM 2025 - Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages3920-3930
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798400720406
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Nov 2025
Event34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2025 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 10 Nov 202514 Nov 2025

Publication series

NameCIKM 2025 - Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

Conference

Conference34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2025
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period10/11/2514/11/25

Keywords

  • context-aware data scraping
  • llm-generated persona
  • search engines
  • statistical significance testing

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