Invisible Search and Online Search Engines

Abstract

Invisible Search and Online Search Engines considers the use of search engines in contemporary everyday life and the challenges this poses for media and information literacy. Looking for mediated information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. Because of this, search engines have a significant impact on the structure of our lives, and personal and public memories. Haider and Sundin consider what this means for society, while also uniting research on information retrieval with research on how people actually look for and encounter information.Search engines are now one of society's key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed. While their use is dispersed across myriads of social practices, where they have acquired close to naturalised positions, they are commercially and technically centralised. Arguing that search, searching, and search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them, Haider and Sundin consider what it means to be so reliant on this all-encompassing and increasingly invisible information infrastructure.Invisible Search and Online Search Engines is the first book to approach search and search engines from a perspective that combines insights from the technical expertise of information science research with a social science and humanities approach. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students working on and studying information science, library and information science (LIS), media studies, journalism, digital cultures, and educational sciences.

Fast-food information, information quality and information gap: a temporal exploration of the notion of information in science communication on climate change

“…These discourses of legitimacy, and ultimately the notion of information quality, can be seen from the perspective of coproduction. From a practice perspective, Haider and Sundin (2019) stress how facts are coproduced and stabilized in the form of documents such as books, articles, and other artefacts of scholarly communication. Likewise, newspapers can here be seen to "stabilize" open letters by attributing a certain form of legitimacy, and thus coproducing the notion of information quality.…”

Information behaviour and practises research informing technology and service design

“…The critique of IBP research drifting away from systems and service design has been raised on several occasions (e.g. Fisher & Julien, 2009;Haider & Sundin, 2019;Ingwersen & Järvelin, 2005;Julien & O'Brien, 2014;Julien, Pecoskie, & Reed, 2011). The gap becomes especially apparent if compared to neighbouring fields such as human-computer interaction and information design with partly overlapping interests with IBP research and a very explicit interest in design.…”

“…It is not a question of a lack of potential for mutual interests and potential (e.g. Beyene & Byström, ; Haider & Sundin, ) but something else. Many influential studies are focused on very specific contexts or activities (like information seeking processes in particular situations or searching specific types of information).…”

“…The evidence of information activities is not always representative of larger populations due to diverse methodological shortcomings in research designs but possibly also because of the complexity of human experience as a whole (O'Brien, Dickinson, & Askin, ). The diversity of theoretical perspectives in IBP research (Haider & Sundin, ) does also mean that it can be difficult to extend insights from one study to another. Further, researchers in this particular field might not always be very good at communicating their findings in a way that is useful in systems and service design and all developers are not necessarily motivated to embrace them.…”

“…Further, researchers in this particular field might not always be very good at communicating their findings in a way that is useful in systems and service design and all developers are not necessarily motivated to embrace them. Finally, especially the impact of the branch of IBP research that aims at understanding rather than explaining information activities (Haider & Sundin, ) can be difficult to trace and appreciate when it is conducted in context and close collaboration with practitioners.…”