Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines

• DOI: 10.1609/icwsm.v13i01.3248
• Publication Date: 2022-11-01T18:43:27Z
• Authors: Nicholas Vincent; Isaac Johnson; Patrick Sheehan; Brent Hecht
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Computers and Society; Computers and Society (cs.CY); 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Search engines are some of the most popular and profitable intelligent technologies in existence. Recent research, however, has suggested that search engines may be surprisingly dependent on user-created content like Wikipedia articles to address user information needs. In this paper, we perform a rigorous audit of the extent to which Google leverages Wikipedia and other user-generated content to respond to queries. Analyzing results for six types of important queries (e.g. most popular, trending, expensive advertising), we observe that Wikipedia appears in over 80% of results pages for some query types and is by far the most prevalent individual content source across all query types. More generally, our results provide empirical information to inform a nascent but rapidly-growing debate surrounding a highlyconsequential question: Do users provide enough value to intelligent technologies that they should receive more of the economic benefits from intelligent technologies?