Auditing Source Diversity Bias in Video Search Results Using Virtual Agents

TL;DR

This study audits domain-level source diversity bias in video search results across different search engines and languages, revealing significant disparities and potential platform biases, especially favoring YouTube in Western search results.

Contribution

It introduces a virtual agent-based method to systematically compare source diversity in video search results across multiple search engines and languages.

Findings

English queries yield more diverse results than Russian queries.

YouTube dominates Western search results, except Google.

Google's results exclude competitors like Vimeo and Dailymotion.

Abstract

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.