2018/05/15 by Elad Yom‐Tov, Yom-Tov, Elad
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Health Literacy and Information Accessibility #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1805.09139
openalex publication_date 2018/05/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The correlation between the demographics of users and the text they write has\nbeen investigated through literary texts and, more recently, social media.\nHowever, differences pertaining to language use in search engines has not been\nthoroughly analyzed, especially for age and gender differences. Such\ndifferences are important especially due to the growing use of search engine\ndata in the study of human health, where queries are used to identify patient\npopulations.\n Using data from multiple general-purpose Internet search engines gathered\nover a period of one month we investigate the correlation between demography\n(age, gender, and income) and the text of queries submitted to search engines.\n Our results show that females and younger people use longer queries. This\ndifference is such that females make approximately 25% more queries with 10 or\nmore words. In the case of queries which identify users as having specific\nmedical conditions we find that females make 50% more queries than expected,\nand that this results in patient cohorts which are highly skewed in gender and\nage, compared to known gender balance.\n Our results indicate that studies where demographic representation is\nimportant, such as in the study of health aspect of users or when search\nengines are evaluated for fairness, care should be taken in the selection of\nsearch engine data so as to create a representative dataset.\n