RAT Community Meeting 2025

The is the free open-source software for examining and assessing search results: Identify search queries, collect the matching search results from various search systems, analyze them, and have them evaluated by jurors. RAT can help you with all these tasks and more.

To learn more about the capabilities of RAT and to gain inspiration for your research, we invite you to join us for the third annual RAT Community Meeting in Hamburg on Friday, September 26, 2025—regardless of your prior experience with RAT.

The ticket prices for the RAT Meeting are €50 for regular tickets and €0 for student tickets, with students requiring a discount code—please contact us via [email protected] if you don’t have one yet.

In addition to the RAT Community Meeting, we would like to draw your attention to the Inaugural Conference of the Search Engines and Society Network (SEASON 2025), which will take place right before the RAT event (Sep. 24 - 25) in Hamburg. to join SEASON 2025!

The RAT Community Meeting takes place the day after the SEASON Conference (Sep. 26, 2025). Please note that you must apply separately for both events.

Info: This talk will introduce the RAT software and its various components. You will learn about the types of studies that can be conducted using RAT. Additionally, we will explain RAT's modules for designing studies, collecting data, juror assessment, and performing automatic data analysis.

Info: In this presentation, we will discuss the new features we have developed since the last community meeting. This includes: 1. With our new scrapers for Large Language Models, it is possible to gather, evaluate and analyze responses from systems like Google’s AI Overviews.
2. The Query Sampler, the tool for exploring search queries, is integrated into RAT now.

Info: Learn more about our plans to make RAT more powerful, flexible, and sustainable: 1. By integrating RAT into a larger research software infrastructure, you can connect it seamlessly to other tools for surveys, data analysis, and more. 2. We are exploring a future option to install RAT locally on your own computer or institutional server. You gain full control over the tool and ensure that all sensitive research data remains securely within your institution. 3. We will provide you with an update about the formation of the new RAT association.

Info: Have a brief look on the various studies conducted with the assistance of RAT and on the specific features of RAT that were utilized for this purpose, such as result overlap, classification or retrieval effectiveness studies in fields like political, health or information science.

Info: Learn more about the functionalities of RAT and how you can use it for your own study ideas. You will be guided through the process of creating a study, identify relevant search queries, collecting data from search engines, analyzing the results and having jurors evaluate the results.

Info: We will conduct studies using RAT in small groups. Based on your study ideas, we will design the studies collaboratively, discuss methodological questions and outline the initial steps for implementation

Info: In this session, you will have the chance to share and discuss the results of the workshops with the other participants in a relaxed atmosphere.

Host or Publisher Search Studies