Unequal Content: Search Engine Personalization Influences Exposure to Information Regarding the Israel–Palestine Conflict

Search engines serve as primary gateways to information, and users tend to trust them, despite being algorithmic black boxes and customizing results in non-transparent ways. Personalization, such as tailoring content based on a user’s location, is useful for routine content searches (e.g., finding nearby restaurants). However, this same personalization becomes problematic - and potentially harmful - when users seek information on sensitive or contentious geopolitical topics. In this work, we present the first large-scale measurement of how search engine curation and personalization affect users across different countries with distinct regional, political, and cultural traits. We developed a novel, privacy-preserving, bot-based methodology that simulates online user profiles embedded with cumulative regional traits. These customized bots were deployed from different locations and conducted identical searches, either on the Israel-Palestine conflict (e.g. “Hamas”) or neutral queries (e.g. “dinner recipe”), using both Google and DuckDuckGo. Our study addresses two main questions: (1) How do search results for the same query differ across countries, and which factors drive these differences?; and (2) Does personalization vary more significantly for conflict-related or for general queries? Our findings show that search result rankings are significantly influenced by location, interface language, and simulated browsing context, with the strongest effects observed for conflict-related queries. In many cases, these differences led to non-neutral portrayals of the same event, depending on the user’s presumed region. These results highlight how search engine personalization can shape public understanding of global events, creating fragmented or biased informational environments. This underscores the importance of educating users about the invisible filters that influence their access to information and, from a policy standpoint, these findings reveal a pressing need for greater transparency and accountability in how search engines personalize politically sensitive content. This is especially urgent given their outsized role in shaping democratic discourse and public opinion worldwide.