Search as research practices on the web: The SaR-Web platform for cross-language engine results analysis

Search engines are the most utilized tools to access information on the Web. The success of large companies such as Google owes to their capacity to conduct users through the vast troves of knowledge and information online. Recently, the concept of search as research has been used to shift the research focus from workings of information-seeking tools towards methods for the social study of Web and particularly the social meanings of engine results. In this paper, we present SaR-Web, a web search tool that provides an automatic means to carry out search as research on the Web. It compares the results of same (translated) queries across search engine language domains, thereby enabling crosslinguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of results. SaR-Web outputs enable the comparative study of cultural mores as well as societal associations and concerns, interpreted through search engine results.