, Como, Italy.
Department of Surgery and Medicine, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Med Health Care Philos. 2020 Jun;23(2):237-246. doi: 10.1007/s11019-020-09940-9.
The widespread use of online search engines to answer the general public's needs for information has raised concerns about possible biases and the emerging of a 'filter bubble' in which users are isolated from attitude-discordant messages. Research is split between approaches that largely focus on the intrinsic limitations of search engines and approaches that investigate user search behavior. This work evaluates the findings and limitations of both approaches and advances a theoretical framework for empirical investigations of cognitive biases in online search activities about health-related topics. We aim to investigate the interaction between the user and the search engine as a whole. Online search activity about health-related topics is considered as a hypothesis-testing process. Two questions emerge: whether the retrieved information provided by the search engines are fit to fulfill their role as evidence, and whether the use of this information by users is cognitively and epistemologically valid and unbiased.
搜索引擎被广泛应用于满足大众的信息需求，但也引发了人们对其可能存在的偏见和“过滤气泡”问题的担忧。“过滤气泡”是指用户会被与自身态度相左的信息隔离。相关研究主要分为两类，一类主要关注搜索引擎的固有局限性，另一类则研究用户的搜索行为。本研究评估了这两种方法的发现和局限性，并提出了一个理论框架，用于实证研究与健康相关的在线搜索活动中的认知偏差。我们旨在研究用户与搜索引擎作为一个整体的相互作用。关于健康相关主题的在线搜索活动被视为一个假设检验过程。由此产生了两个问题：搜索引擎提供的检索信息是否适合作为证据，以及用户对这些信息的使用在认知和认识论上是否有效和无偏见。
