What Snippets Feel: Depression, Search, and Snippets

Published in The 1st Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE), 2020

Recommended citation: Milton, A. & Pera, M. S. (2020). "What Snippets Feel: Depression, Search, and Snippets " The 1st Joint Conference of the Information Retrieval Communities in Europe (CIRCLE). http://ashleemilton.github.io/files/feelCircle2020.pdf

Mental health disorders (MHD) is a rising, yet stigmatized, topic in the United States. Individuals suffering from MHD are slowing starting to overcome this stigma by discussing how technology affects them. Researchers have explored behavioral nuances that emerge from interactions of individuals affected by MHD with persuasive technologies, mainly social media. Yet, there is a gap in the analysis pertaining to search engines, another persuasive technology, which is part of their everyday lives. In this paper, we report the results of an initial exploratory analysis conducted to understand the sentiment/emotion profiles of search engines handling the information needs of searchers with MHD.

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