  In today's high-choice media environment, search engines play an integral
role in informing individuals and societies about the latest events. The
importance of search algorithms is even higher at the time of crisis, when
users search for information to understand the causes and the consequences of
the current situation and decide on their course of action. In our paper, we
conduct a comparative audit of how different search engines prioritize visual
information related to COVID-19 and what consequences it has for the
representation of the pandemic. Using a virtual agent-based audit approach, we
examine image search results for the term "coronavirus" in English, Russian and
Chinese on five major search engines: Google, Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, and
DuckDuckGo. Specifically, we focus on how image search results relate to
generic news frames (e.g., the attribution of responsibility, human interest,
and economics) used in relation to COVID-19 and how their visual composition
varies between the search engines.

Information Retrieval