Shuffling a Few Stalls in a Crowded Bazaar: Potential Impact of Document-Side Fairness on Unprivileged Info-Seekers

Information systems rely on algorithmic ranking to ascertain expected relevance. Concerns about this strategy have resulted in the emergence of a field of inquiry referred to as fair ranking. Within this field, the aim varies between one-sided and two-sided fairness across automatically generated rankings. But research has focused primarily on fairness among document providers as opposed to fairness among searchers. Concerns have already been raised about the present framing of fairness. In the following line of research, a novel framing concern is introduced, whereby researchers may fail to consider the broader context of search engine usage among protected groups of searchers.