Search Historian

Working with economists from Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, we created a web browser extension using the modular Webmunk platform to implement experiments within search engines to measure how changing the order of results affected consumer behavior.

The Search Historian extension also employed many of the same techniques introduced in BRIC co-founder Ericka Menchen-Trevino's Web Historian extension to capture search behavior before the extension was installed to establish a useful behavioral baseline. We extended the Webmunk platform to include a new page manipulation module that used a set of declarative rules built on DOM selectors that allowed researchers to control and modify the experiment remotely, eliminating the need to unnecessary updates.

In addition to creating user baselines, we also introduced a "browser mirror" feature to the Webmunk platform that detected when users were searching on one search engine, and Search Historian would silently execute the same queries across a range of search engines to establish cross-platform baselines as well.

The results of this experiment are available in the NBER working paper Sources of Market Power in Web Search: Evidence from a Field Experiment