TY - JOUR AU - Vincent, Nicholas AU - Johnson, Isaac AU - Sheehan, Patrick AU - Hecht, Brent PY - 2019/07/06 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines JF - Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media JA - ICWSM VL - 13 IS - 01 SE - Full Papers DO - 10.1609/icwsm.v13i01.3248 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/3248 SP - 505-516 AB - <p>Search engines are some of the most popular and profitable intelligent technologies in existence. Recent research, however, has suggested that search engines may be surprisingly dependent on user-created content like Wikipedia articles to address user information needs. In this paper, we perform a rigorous audit of the extent to which Google leverages Wikipedia and other user-generated content to respond to queries. Analyzing results for six types of important queries (e.g. most popular, trending, expensive advertising), we observe that Wikipedia appears in over 80% of results pages for some query types and is by far the most prevalent individual content source across all query types. More generally, our results provide empirical information to inform a nascent but rapidly-growing debate surrounding a highlyconsequential question: Do users provide enough value to intelligent technologies that they should receive more of the economic benefits from intelligent technologies?</p> ER -