Search Atlas: Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders

Search Atlas: Visualizing Divergent Search Results Across Geopolitical Borders Rodrigo Ochigame, Katherine Ye DIS '21: ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 Session: Boundary Work Abstract The internet is full of invisible borders—geographic, linguistic, cultural, political—that circumscribe the information each user sees. Search engines shape such “information borders” by tailoring results according to geolocation, language, and other user profiling. We present Search Atlas, a tool paired with visualizations that enable users to see and cross these borders. For instance, how do search results for the same query differ for Brazilian, Turkish, and Indian users? Given a query, the tool displays multiple lists of Google search results, highlighting distinctive words for each set of parameters. Then, we provide visualizations that juxtapose and cluster Google results across countries, revealing new information borders and regions that can vary widely depending on the query. By exposing the partial p