🌱🛒 Do search engines quietly undermine sustainable shopping?
Our CHIIR 2026 short paper "Rare but Respected: Sustainable Intent in Online Product Search" by Florian Meier (Aalborg Universitet) and David Elsweiler provides a first answer.
Using 3.95 million queries (a 1% random sample from the AmazonQAC dataset), the authors examined how ethically minded consumers express sustainability in product search - and how query autocompletion responds.
📊 What they found:
- Only ~1% of queries contain explicit sustainability intent - concentrated in categories like "Food & Grocery" and "Health & Beauty"
- Query autocompletion preserves sustainability-related terms in 60% of cases
- Query autocompletion adds sustainability-related terms in a further 40%
- These additions of sustainability terms are more likely for longer and more frequent queries.
💡 In other words:
Query autocompletion often reinforces ethical consumption cues. This challenges the common assumption that digital search infrastructures inherently bias users towards unsustainable consumption.
📄 Read the pre-print here: https://vbn.aau.dk/en/publications/rare-but-respected-sustainable-intent-in-online-product-search/ (external link, opens in a new window)
If you're heading to CHIIR 2026, come find us in the Poster Session and let's autocomplete the conversation in Seattle 😉🌿
#OnlineSearch #ProductSearch #ConsumerBehaviour
#EthicalConsumption #ResponsibleConsumption #Sustainability
#QueryIntent #Bias
#QueryAutoCompletion #QAC
#SearchSystems
#InformationRetrieval #IR
#HumanComputerInteraction #HCI
#OnlineShopping #Ecommerce
#EmpiricalStudy #RegressionAnalysis
#ACM #SIGIR #ConferenceOnHumanInformationInteractionAndRetrieval #CHIIR #CHIIR2026
#ResearchSuccess #ResearchPaperAccepted
#InformationScienceRegensburg #StayInformed
