Table 2.
Summary of virtual agent routines for different search engines.
| Text results | News | Images | Videos | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Navigate 5 RPs. | Navigate 5 RPs. | Scroll and load 3 RPSs. | Navigate 5 RPs. | |
| Bing | Navigate 7 or 8 RPs. | Scroll and load 10 RPs. | Scroll and load 10 RPSs. | Scroll and load 14 RPs. |
| DuckDuckGo | Scroll and load 3 RPSs. | Scroll and load 3 RPSs. | Scroll and load 4 RPSs. | Scroll and load 3 RPSs. |
| Yahoo! | Navigate 5 RPs. | Navigate 5 RPs | Scroll and load 5 RPSs.Click on loadmore imagesin each scroll. | Scroll and load 3 RPSs.Click on load morevideos in each scroll. |
| Yandex | Navigate 1 RPs. | Navigate 1 RPs. | Scroll and load 3 RPSs. | Scroll and load 3 RPSs.Click on load more videos in each scroll. |
| Baidu | Navigate 5 RPs. | Navigate 5 RPs. | Scroll and load 7 RPSs. | Scroll and load 7 RPSs. |
| Sogou | Navigate 5 RPs. | Not implemented | Scroll and load 6 RPSs. | Navigate 5 RPs. URLbar is modified using push state. |
| So | Navigate 5 RPs. Wait after scrollingto the bottom, so ads and a navigation bar load. | Not implemented | Scroll and load 10 RPSs. | Navigate 5 RPs. (automaticallyredirects to video.360kan.com) |
RP: Result Page; RPS: Result Page Section.
The table shows the search engine (first column), and the simulated actions for each search category, which are always visited in the order of column: text, news, images and videos. The bot always scrolls down to the bottom of each Result Page (RP) and each Result Page Section (RPS). RPSs refer to the content that is dynamically loaded on ‘continuous’ search result pages (e.g. image search on Google). The bot uses Javascript to simulate the keyboard, click and scroll inputs, potentially triggering events that are part of the search engine internal code. Important particularities of search engines are highlighted in italics.