Examining exposure diversity on Google News in Australia

This article presents results from a sub-project established under thebanner of the ADM+S Australian Search Experience ‘citizen science’research project. The aim was to characterise news recommendationspresented to Australians through Google News. The project investigatedthe search results for 20 keywords related to Australian politics and globalissues, including names of politicians, political parties, global sportingevents and various COVID-related terms. Keywords were organised intotwo keyword sets: ‘Australian Politics’ and ‘Global Issues’. Theresearchers found that Google News search results were not personalisedwith respect to demographics or geography. A small subset of domainsdominated the first page of results. While several major Australian newsdomains were regularly observed for the ‘Australian Politics’ keyword set,the ‘Global Issues’ category featured more news domains from the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom. These findings help to better understandhow search engines present news content to ordinary internet users.