Conference Overview

Search Engines and Society Annual Conference (SEASON 2025) brings together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss the societal impact of search technologies. The conference offers keynotes, panels, workshops, and networking opportunities.

Location

HAW Hamburg – Finkenau Campus
Finkenau 35, 22081 Hamburg, Germany

Date

24–25 September 2025

Registration

Secure your spot now to be part of SEASON 2025.

Register here: SEASON 2025 Registration

Programme

The two-day programme includes:

• Keynote lectures from leading scholars and practitioners

• Panel discussions on pressing issues in search and society

• Workshops for hands-on exchange

• Paper sessions showcasing cutting-edge research

Explore the full Conference Programme here: SEASON 2025 Conference Programme

Registration and Conference fee

Register now to join us at the SEASON 2025 Conference: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=season2025 .

Conference Fee:

• €150 (regular)

• €50 (student)

For assistance with the registration and payment process on EasyChair, please refer to our step-by-step guide, available here:

Registration and Payment Guide- SEASON 2025

Conference Programme

Explore the online Conference Programme on EasyChair here: SEASON 2025 Conference Programme

Keynote Speakers

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Matthias Spielkamp
(co-founder and executive director of AlgorithmWatch)
AlgorithmWatch: Algorithmic Accountability Reporting Revisited

Photo: Julia Bornkessel, CC BY 4.0

Matthias Spielkamp is co-founder and executive director of AlgorithmWatch (Theodor Heuss Medal 2018, Grimme Online Nominee 2019, Brandenburger Freiheitspreis 2023) and founder and president of AlgorithmWatch CH. He is a member of the advisory council to the German Digital Services Coordinator (DSC), elected by the German Bundestag. Matthias testified before committees of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the German Bundestag and other institutions on automation and AI and was a member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) from 2020-2022. Matthias serves on the governing boards of the German section of Reporters Without Borders and Stiftung Warentest, the advisory councils of Freudenberg Stiftung and the Whistleblower Network and the Expert Committee on Communication/Information of Germany’s UNESCO Commission. He was a fellow of ZEIT Stiftung, Stiftung Mercator and the American Council on Germany. Matthias is editor of the Automating Society reports and has written and edited books on the automation of society, digital journalism and Internet governance. He holds master’s degrees in Journalism from the University of Colorado in Boulder and in Philosophy from the Free University of Berlin.

Abstract: In 2015, a handful of people set out to create an entire organisation around the idea of “holding algorithms accountable to democracy”. 10 years later, after various attempts to pry open the black boxes of search engines, social media and “AI”, it’s time to take stock: What have we achieved, what is still lacking, what is on the horizon?

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Prof. Dr. Anne Beaulieu
(University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Search engines beyond search: questions for a critical knowledge infrastructure

Prof. dr. Anne Beaulieu holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Knowledge Infrastructures at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is co-author of Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021), of Smart Grids from a Global Perspective (Springer, 2016), and of Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2012). She also chairs the editorial board of the Liveable Futures book series at Amsterdam University Press. In 2023-24, she was joint fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and of the Data Science Centre at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-coordinated the PhD training network of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). This presentation is based on her book Revealing Relations: Knowledge Relations for Liveable Futures (Bristol University Press, 2026).

Abstract: Search engines play a powerful role in ordering knowledge and in shaping interactions with data, sources or documents. The current dominance of ‘search’ has been well documented and various facets (relevance, optimization, ranking, bias) have been examined and refines in sophisticated ways. But as search engines become further embedded in layered knowledge infrastructures, it is all the more important to unearth how search shapes knowledge needs and how these needs are met. In this presentation, I want to share a number of questions to explore important assumptions of search engines: It is possible to imagine other functions for search engines, besides supporting retrieval? Can a search engine succeed otherwise than through best match? Can assumptions be foregrounded so that search engines are more reflexive–at what cost and with which advantages? How do conversational interfaces increase the urgency of questioning these assumptions? These questions can spur new interactions and explorations across lines of work, connecting epistemology and design, ethics and computation, politics and indexing.

Accepted Contributions

We are pleased to share the contributions selected for SEASON 2025. The programme includes a diverse range of formats and topics at the intersection of search engines and society.

Long Presentations

1. Politically Misleading Large Language Models: Evidence From the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections Reveals LLM Fact-Checking Limitations – Joachim Baumann, Aleksandra Urman, Ronald E. Robertson and Aniko Hannak
2. Assessing Recommendation Diversity in Search Results: Approaches Using Data Donations and Artificial Personas – Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Ashwin Nagappa, Abdul Obeid, Shir Weinbrand and Brett Tweedie
3. Ambisearchers: Search Modalities and Algorithmic Awareness – Meghan Dowell
4. Exploring the search for home and belonging. Search engines as players on the property market. – Jessica Enevold Duncan and Ann-Sofie Klareld
5. Reimagining Search: A Privacy-Preserving and Inclusive Infrastructure for Disability Knowledge Retrieval– Noor Afshan Fathima, Noor Khuthejatul Kubra and Andreas Wagner
6. Detecting and Quantifying Bias in Search Query Suggestions for US Politicians – Fabian Haak and Philipp Schaer
7. Conceptualising Ignorance Logics in Search — with Examples of Environmental Issues – Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl
8. Auditing Google’s AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancy – Desheng Hu, Aleksandra Urman, Joachim Baumann, Elsa Lichtenegger, Robin Forsberg, Aniko Hannak and Christo Wilson
9. “Be like others”: On what search engines tell us about our nations – Vihang Jumle, Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova
10. Reclaiming Search: Ecosia and the Shifting Moral Economy of Digital Infrastructure – Karine Lespinasse
11. Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Online Search: Findings from a Study Commissioned by the German State Media Authorities – Dirk Lewandowski
12. Evaluating Search Engines‘ Influence on Democratic Values: An Analysis Through the Lens of Information Ethics – Katharina Leyrer
13. Rethinking search intent: from traditional search engines to AI-powered information retrieval – Elsa Lichtenegger, Aleksandra Urman and Anikó Hannák
14. Absent Links: LLMs, Search Infrastructures, and the Information Ecosystem – Nora Lindemann
15. Auditing what the algorithm pays attention to at the time of war: How image search framed the Russian-Ukrainian war before and after the 2022 invasion – Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova, Aleksandra Urman and Roberto Ulloa
16. Ethics-by-design: A values framework for open web search – Christine Plote, Renée Ridgway, Daniela Zetti
17. Re-search.site: a bespoke platform for capturing, comparing and critiquing knowledge infrastructures of searching – Renée Ridgway
18. Negotiating knowledge by referring to search: exploring the verb ‘to google’ in Swedish online discussions on the climate – Malte Rödl
19. From Validity to Inter-Subjectivity: An Argument for Reliability Metadata in Search Environments – Frans van der Sluis
20. Bias is in the Eye of the Beholder: How Users Understand Search Engine Bias and How It Affects Trust in Search Results – Vziatysheva Victoria, Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova and Vihang Jumle

Short Presentations

1. Global reach and local context: the impact of bilinguality on online search – Cecilia Andersson
2. Topic extraction and query generation from websites – Kardelen Bilir
3. Investigating the Reinforcement of Social Norms in Image Search Results – Tim Gollub, Ann-Marie Wohlfahrt, Pierre Achkar and Benno Stein
4. Towards Inclusive Search: Integrating Language Complexity in Information Retrieval – Jennifer Gnyp and Tobias Siebenlist
5. Decentralizing Web Search: the PeARS search engine – Aurelie Herbelot 
6. Empirically measuring algorithmically embodied emissions of information access systems – Florian Meier and David Elsweiler
7. Visualizing social memory – How visual search engines structure the social memory – Robert Musil
8. ChatGPT vs Google Search: A topic flow analysis of Reddit discussions – Kristofer Rolf Söderström
9. Effect of search engine optimisation on reliable healthcare information online | Healthcare SEO – Natalie Tutzer

Interactive Sessions 

1. Search Engine Ethics and You: Co-Designing Tools for Public Engagement – Rosie Graham
2. Educational consequences of the changing landscape of searching – Olof Sundin, Anna-Lena Godhe, Amanda Persson and Jan Ole Størup

Posters

1. SearchBench: Evaluating Citation Practices in AI-Powered Search Engines – Joachim Baumann, Kshitijaa Jaglan, Elsa Lichtenegger, Aleksandra Urman, Desheng Hu and Aniko Hannak
2. Gerontological Perspectives on Technostress and E-Fatigue Among University of the Philippines Diliman Librarians: Insights on Their Use of Search Engines – Miriam Charmigrace Salcedo, Maria Maura Tinao and Jessie Rose Bagunu
3. NPDS FAIR Search Engines with Interoperable Exchange of the Free Flow of Findable Facts in Open Collaboration Networks – Adam Craig and Carl Taswell
4. Query Log Analysis on an Academic Search Portal for Economics and Business Studies – Oliver Hahn, Ralf Krestel and Marianne Saam
5. What Citizens Search and Municipal Websites Offer – Helena Häußler
6. Ranking of Wikipedia Articles in Search Engines. Partial replication of the study ”Ranking of Wikipedia articles revisited” from 2011 – Hanna Käfer
7. Reflecting on search histories: a survey design to uncover users’ cognitive and motivational processes – Elsa Lichtenegger, Aleksandra Urman and Anikó Hannák
8. Planetary sapiens: search engines, utopias and dystopias – Mikael Eriksson
9. How search engines frame political initiatives – Vihang Jumle, Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova and Victoria Vziatysheva
10. Invisible in Search? Auditing Gender Bias in the Visual Representation of Holocaust Victims on Google – Mykola Makhortykh, Tobias Rohrbach and Maryna Sydorova
11. Algorithmic Masculinity – Encounters with the Manosphere – Amanda Persson
12. Web Search on Emerging Topics – Alisa Rieger and Ran Yu
13. Beyond Topicality: How do Social and Life Scientists select what to read? – Jacqueline Sachse
14. Do They Capture All the Attention? Analyzing Google’s AI Overviews Using Eye-Tracking and Quality Evaluation – Sebastian Schultheiß and Dirk Lewandowski
15. Enhancing Open Data Findability through Generative AI: A Conceptual Approach to Improving Structured Data Discovery – Tobias Siebenlist and Jennifer Gnyp
16. Climate disinformation on Google Search: An audit of Google’s algorithms and principle of trustworthiness. – Åsa Rolfsdotter Söderberg and Agnes Tibbelin
17. Are schools suitable for (information literacy) education? Perspectives from Danish lower secondary school – Jan Ole Størup
18. ReSearch: Researching the transforming landscape of information seeking – AI technologies and learning in Swedish schools – Olof Sundin, Anna-Lena Godhe and Kristofer Rolf Söderström

Travel Information

The organisers recommend that participants travel by train. The event will take place at the Faculty of Design, Media and Information at Finkenau 35 in Hamburg.

Contact Information

We look forward to welcoming you to Hamburg in September. If you have any queries or questions, please contact:

• Programme chair: Olof Sundin
• Local chairs: Dirk Lewandowski and Sebastian Schultheiß

Call for Contributions

Inaugural Conference of the Search Engines and Society Network (SEASON2025)

On behalf of the Search Engines and Society Network (SEASON), we invite you to attend the inaugural conference of the network, to be held at HAW Hamburg, Germany, 24th – 25th September 2025.

SEASON is an annual conference that explores the multifaceted role of search engines in today’s culture and society. SEASON brings together researchers from different fields and fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration to deepen our understanding of search engines as cultural, societal, and technical artefacts, as well as how they are used in various practices.

After successful workshops in Lund (2021), Vienna (2022), Hamburg (2023) and Birmingham (2024), we feel it is time to broaden the research engagement into a conference series. We are pleased to announce the next edition of SEASON in Hamburg. This year, we aim to develop the conference to invite submissions for presentations, panels, posters, and experimental formats.

Conference Theme

We welcome submissions on topics such as:

• Social and cultural aspects of relevance
• Epistemic implications of search-engine use
• Search engines and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Search engines and information disorders (e.g., data voids, disinformation…)
• AI and changing patterns of search engine use
• Search and search engines and environmental crises (e.g., climate change)
• The political economy of search and search engines
• Search engine providers’ responsibility and accountability
• Search engines as multi-sided platforms
• History of web search and web search engines
• Search engine bias and fair search
• Ethical considerations related to search engines
• Affect and emotional aspects of search engine use
• Media and Information literacy related to search engines
• Search engines and specific groups or communities (children, elderly, …)
• Search engines and studies of ignorance and information avoidance
• Search engines in everyday life and in social practices
• Search engines in educational settings
• Alternative approaches to concepts of indexing in search engines
• Negotiations of search results (search engine optimization, paid search advertising)
• Search engine comparisons (e.g., comparing results tailored to different locations, comparing results from different search engines)
• Methods for search engine research
• Data collection for search engine studies
• Approaches to “opening the Black Box of search engine rankings”

We welcome conceptual and empirical submissions from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, including the humanities, social sciences, and technical disciplines. We welcome approaches transgressing disciplinary boundaries and submissions from individuals from outside academia. Submissions discussing work in progress are welcome. We also encourage students to submit contributions.

Submission Categories

Papers: Papers should be submitted in the form of an extended abstract. The maximum length of extended paper abstracts is 1000 words (excluding references).

Interactive Sessions (for example, panels and workshops): Should be designed for 60-90 minutes. The proposal should include the purpose, abstract, and format, and be a maximum of 1000 words (excluding references).

Posters: Posters should be submitted in the form of an abstract with a maximum of 500 words (excluding references).

Shorts: An opportunity to discuss ongoing research or present interventions (short informal presentations of less than 20 minutes). Proposals should be submitted in the form of abstracts (maximum 500 words, excluding references) that describe the topic of your presentation and include some information about its structure.

Submission Guidelines

• Papers should be submitted as a .PDF file.
• Place the title of the paper in bold at the top of the first page only. On the next line, include the names of the author(s), along with their email addresses and affiliations.
• References should follow the APA referencing style.
• Please ensure the paper has been carefully proofread.

Please submit your contribution via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=season2025

Accepted contributions will be available for downloading for conference participants in advance of the conference. All accepted abstracts will be freely accessible to everyone after the conference.