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arXiv · 1906.08576

Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines

Nicholas Vincent·Isaac Johnson·Patrick Sheehan·Brent Hecht
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Abstract

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 highly-consequential question: Do users provide enough value to intelligent technologies that they should receive more of the economic benefits from intelligent technologies?

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Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Patrick Sheehan, Brent Hecht. 2019-06-20. Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08576

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