Googling for Abortion: Search Engine Mediation of Abortion Accessibility in the United States

Abstract

Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional difficulty by targeting women with unexpected or “crisis” pregnancies in order to dissuade them from the procedure. Web search engines may prove to be another barrier, being in a powerful position to direct their users to health information, and above all, health services. In this study we ask, to what degree does Google Search provide quality responses to users searching for an abortion provider, specifically in terms of directing them to abortion clinics (ACs) or CPCs. To answer this question, we considered the scenario of a woman searching for abortion services online, and conducted 10 abortion-related queries from 467 locations across the United States once a week for 14 weeks. Overall, among Google’s location results that feature businesses alongside a map, 79.4% were ACs, and 6.9% were CPCs. When an AC was returned, it was the closest known AC location 86.9% of the time. However, when a CPC appeared in a result set, it was the closest one to the search location 75.9% of the time. Examining correlates of AC results, we found that fewer AC results were returned for searches from poorer and rural areas, and those with TRAP laws governing AC facility and clinician requirements. We also observed that Google’s performance on our queries significantly improved following a major algorithm update. These results have important implications concerning health access quality and equity, both for individual users and public health policy.

Identifying Search Directives on Social Media

“…The most frequent text search directive query we found in the Gab dataset was "died suddenly," which refers to a conspiracy theory centering the COVID-19 vaccine that we examine in the case studies in the next section. We also found a number of queries related to other politicized topics or phrases, including abortion-related queries (e.g., "abortion clinics" and "crisis pregnancy centers") and race-related queries (e.g., "white lives matter"), both of which have been found to be areas of concern for data voids in past work (Mejova, Gracyk, and Robertson 2022;Noble 2018).…”

Capturing the Aftermath of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Decision in Google Search Results across the U.S.

“…We collected data for 65 locations, a dataset which is sufficient for statistical analyses, but is still small with respect to the size of the United States. We did not test that changing the location using coordinates exactly simulates physically being in a location; however, we did ensure that the location for each SERP was changed correctly, and we tested and manually validated that local results were returned for localized queries (such as test queries for "pizza" and "taxes near me"), consistent with prior studies (e.g., (Mejova, Gracyk, and Robertson 2022)). Lastly, due to the large amount of space needed to store the results as HTML pages, the files were periodically moved from the seven computers used for the collection to a central server with more available space.…”

“…A 2022 longitudinal study by (Mejova, Gracyk, and Robertson 2022) used a Google Search's feature to set the location of the search to a desired one and utilized it to collect data from 467 locations in the United States about abortion clinics. The study relies on the open-source library, WebSearcher, 6 used in other search engine audits as well, which automatically parses the components of a search results page.…”

“…Furthermore, the ads are labeled based on whether they provide abortion or not, as well as the entities listed in Places. In the past, the lack of labeling was a concern, and prior research (Mejova, Gracyk, and Robertson 2022) has focused on auditing this aspect of Google Search.…”