Green Search

A study of the practice of search and other relevant information practices regarding the representation of environmental problems and suggested solutions for those problems.

A study of the practices of search engine use and recommendation services regarding the representation of environmental problems and suggested solutions for those problems, as they are constructed as relevant in Google, in smartphone apps, and via various groups, lists and pages in social media applications, which function as recommendation services between people known to each other or between people and selected organisations.

Theoretically this is situated in a socio-technical framework. This is specifically relevant in the light of search engines' move towards an increased personalization of search and to semantic search. Both trends become even more pronounced with the advance of mobile search based on location aware technology. Environmental problems tend to be controversial and are given meaning in different ways depending on interests, allegiance and context. The following research questions guide the study: How is trust attributed to the information sources retrieved? Which interests, organizations or link relations are perceived as trustworthy? In which ways do users judge mediated personal recommendations compared with search engine results? How are environmental issues configured through web search and recommendation services? Methodologically, this is done by combining web-analysis (link analysis, web crawling) with user studies which will also include mobile technology.