Keynote- Search engines beyond search: questions for a critical knowledge infrastructure

Conference of the Search Engines and Society Network, Hamburg

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Abstract: Search engines play a powerful role in ordering knowledge and in shaping interactions with data, sources or documents. The current dominance of ‘search’ has been well documented and various facets (relevance, optimization, ranking, bias) have been examined and refines in sophisticated ways. But as search engines become further embedded in layered knowledge infrastructures, it is all the more important to unearth how search shapes knowledge needs and how these needs are met. In this presentation, I want to share a number of questions to explore important assumptions of search engines: It is possible to imagine other functions for search engines, besides supporting retrieval? Can a search engine succeed otherwise than through best match? Can assumptions be foregrounded so that search engines are more reflexive–at what cost and with which advantages? How do conversational interfaces increase the urgency of questioning these assumptions? These questions can spur new interactions and explorations across lines of work, connecting epistemology and design, ethics and computation, politics and indexing.

Prof. dr. Anne Beaulieu holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Knowledge Infrastructures at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is co-author of Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021), of Smart Grids from a Global Perspective (Springer, 2016), and of Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2012). She also chairs the editorial board of the Liveable Futures book series at Amsterdam University Press. In 2023-24, she was joint fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and of the Data Science Centre at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-coordinated the PhD training network of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). This presentation is based on her book Revealing Relations: Knowledge Relations for Liveable Futures (Bristol University Press, 2026).