About us

SEASON 2026 is the annual conference for the Search Engines and Society Network, exploring the multifaceted role of search engines in today's culture and society. It fosters interdisciplinary dialogue between researchers, practitioners, and students to understand search engines as cultural, societal, political, and technical artifacts.

Important Dates

Sun, May 10, 2026
Submission deadline for all categories
Tue, Sep 15, 2026
Conference start date
Thu, Sep 17, 2026
Conference end date

Call For Paper

Social and cultural aspects of relevance
Epistemic implications of search-engine use
Search engines and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Search engines and disinformation
AI and changing patterns of search engine use
Search engine providers’ responsibility and accountability
Search engines as multi-sided platforms
History of web search and web search engines
Search engine bias and fair search
Ethical considerations related to search engines
Affect and emotional aspects of search engine use
Information literacy related to search engines
Search engines and specific groups (children, elderly,...)
Search engines and studies of ignorance and information avoidance
Search engines in everyday life and in social practices
Search engines in educational settings
Alternative approaches to concepts of indexing in search engines
Search engines and the role of data voids
Negotiations of search results (search engine optimization, paid search advertising)
Search engine comparisons (e.g., comparing results tailored to different locations, comparing results from different search engines)
Methods for search engine research
Data collection for search engine studies
Approaches to “opening the Black Box of search engine rankings”

We welcome conceptual and empirical submissions from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, including the humanities, social sciences, and technical disciplines. Submissions for long presentations, interactive sessions, posters, and short presentations are invited.