Analysis of search queries suggested by a Swedish climate obstruction network

• Malte Rödl - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences - Department of Urban and Rural Development

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• Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

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• Access to data is restricted

• English
• Swedish

• Media unit: Text
• Other
• Media unit

The data is concerned with the search queries suggested on the blog of a Swedish climate obstruction network (hereafter referred to as CON). Further data investigates what these search queries reveal (DuckDuckGo and Google), and how they have been spread in Swedish print media. Furthermore, we compared these to hyperlinks found on the same blog.

• Time series: Continuous
• Time series

• Total universe/Complete enumeration

Queries were identified by scraping the entire blog, looking for the imperative verb "googla" (Swedish for "google!") followed by a keyphrase. This was assumed to constitute one query, which we then followed through Retriever's news database (all Swedish printed press), as well as the search engines Google and DuckDuckGo.

• 2014-01-01 - 2022-07-31

• Numeric
• Text

Content coding

1. On 1 August 2022, we used the software httrack to crawl the CON’s blog, retrieving 2654 posts. 2. We extracted 1943 hyperlinks from the retrieved blog posts. 3. We identified 268 occurrences of the term “googla” on 177 different blog posts since 2014. 4. We identified and tabulated all explicitly suggested keyphrases, i.e., those that follow an imperative verb and are quoted or follow a colon. 5. We coded the retrieved keyphrases according to their syntactical composition. Coding was carried out by the first author and validated by the second author. 6. We created a set of 25 keyphrases to use as seeds for further data creation. The set included all ten keyphrases that had been suggested at least four times, and added 15 strategically selected keyphrases used two or three times to increase variation. 7. We submitted the compiled keyphrases to the Swedish media database Retriever, yielding 240 results from Swedish print media. Of those, 204 asked readers to “google” the respective keyphrase. 8. We submitted the same keyphrases as queries to Google Search and DuckDuckGo, using the search retrieval analysis software RAT (Result Assessment Tool) to obtain the first SERP for each search engine as well as the HTML source code of results (Lewandowski et al., 2022; data available via Sünkler et al., 2023). We submitted (a) the suggested queries; (b) the suggested queries in quotation marks (i.e., verbatim search); and (c) the Swedish imperative form of “google” followed by the suggested keyphrase (no quotation marks). With a maximum of 10 results per query, but often fewer and sometimes no results for queries b and c, we obtained 146 SERPs and 1001 search results. 9. Of these, 249 results link to the CON’s blog, and further 236 results mention the CON or its authors—usually signed by the CON or linking to it. Few referred to the blog as engaged in climate obstruction (e.g. by debunking the CON’s claims); conversely, not all climate obstruction content in the data set mentions the CON. 10. Based on search results and hyperlinks, we classified 204 unique domains as frequent, i.e. they occurred in at least two SERPs, at least 10 hyperlinks, or at least 1 SERP and 4 hyperlinks. As these counts represent the possibility of finding a specific domain, we included duplicate targets in these counts. We coded these frequent domains regarding their site type and language. Coding was carried out by the first author and validated by the second author. For more details, see the included README file.

2014-01-01 - 2022-07-31

• Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

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• Communications: Public
• Communications

• Sweden

Data concerned with blog and publications of a Swedish-language climate obstruction network. Some data and connections spread outside of the Swedish-language internet.

Department of Urban and Rural Development

• Jutta Haider - University of Borås - Swedish School of Library and Information Science

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• Environment and conservation
• Information society
• Media
• Social change

• Communication studies
• Social sciences interdisciplinary
• Information studies

• Social research
• Climate
• Internet use
• Communication and information studies
• Media literacy
• Communication research

• climate obstruction
• search engine
• climate denial