Towards improving user awareness of search engine biases: a participatory design approach

Bias in news search engines has been shown to inŕuence users’ perceptions of a news topic and contribute to the polarisation of society. As a result, there is a need for news search engines that increase user awareness of biases in the search results. Whilst technical approaches have been developed to mitigate biases in search, very few studies have investigated user preferences in interface designs for potentially raising their awareness of biases in news search engines. In this study, we utilised a participatory design methodology to develop eight prototypes with different features that could potentially be used to raise user awareness of biases in news search engines. We conducted three user studies, involving 132 participants with Computer Science backgrounds, to evaluate these prototypes. Our findings indicate the importance of news search engines that i) inform users of possible biases in the results (bias visualisation approach), and ii) allow users to access alternative search results (results-reranking approach). Our study provides further insights into the strengths and possible risks of each approach, which are important for future research on designing interfaces for raising user awareness of biases in news search engines.